


Another Brick in the Wall

by MadBadAndPlaid



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, BAMF Dean Winchester, BAMF Sam Winchester, Bromance, Case Fic, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Protective Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester's Wall, Season/Series 06, Suspense, pink floyd - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-03-08 11:36:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3207755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadBadAndPlaid/pseuds/MadBadAndPlaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sam vanishes on a case, it feels like every nightmare Dean's had since he got his brother's soul back is coming true. Waking up buried alive doesn't exactly make it Sam's favorite day, either.</p><p>Then it really starts to get weird.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. so you thought you might like to go to the show

**Author's Note:**

> >   
>    
>  _When Sam vanishes on a case, it feels like every nightmare Dean's had since he got his brother's soul back is coming true. Waking up buried alive doesn't exactly make it Sam's favorite day, either: his captor wants something he can only deliver by using powers he's sworn never to touch again and isn't even certain he still has. One of Rufus's old contacts offers Dean a way to find his brother—but only if Dean does him a few favors of the sort that could get him killed. Both brothers will have to decide how far they'll go to get back to each other._  
> 
>> 
>>  
>> 
>>   
>  _And per usual, that's just the start of their problems._  
>    
> 
> 
> This story is set sometime shortly after 06x17, "My Heart Will Go On": Sam has his soul back (06x12); Dean's anxious about him scratching Death's wall, especially after the Hell seizure he had at the end of the Arachne case they worked in Bristol, Rhode Island (06x13); Gwen, Samuel, and Rufus all died in the events of "And Then There Were None" (06x16), and Bobby is deep in mourning (and the bottle) for Rufus. Cas is embroiled in the heavenly war. Sam is struggling to set aside the consuming need to know exactly what he did—who he was—in the year he can't remember in order to respect Dean's fears for him. But at the end of the day, he's a hunter. Just like his brother.
> 
> Many thanks to gaialux for betaing this chapter. All remaining defects are mine alone.

..  
...  
..

Sam expected to wake to darkness. He didn't.

The rest of his expectations—pain, cold, obvious isolation—those all came true, but as he surfaced from the oily slosh in his head, he slowly realized that the gray surface in front of his eyes was shadowed, textured, and not, in fact, a dream.

Neither was the smell.

_Plink. Plink._

A sewer. Of course it would be a sewer.

He tried to take stock of himself. He was vaguely aware that he should have felt some urgency about this, but it was too hard to fight through the sludgy feeling in his limbs, under his tongue, in his head. It pressed on his lungs, and all his thoughts were submerged in it. He hurt: burning pain where something had dragged him, dull pain where his head had bounced. He was cold. Whatever had taken him had left him in jeans and a t-shirt, and he was lying in a puddle of what, if he were very, very lucky, might be water. More than anything else, though, he felt groggy, nauseated, and stiffer than he'd ever been in his life.

How long had he been out?

_Dean._

Slowly, Sam curled in on himself, sucked in a breath, and rolled over. Bile rose in his throat, and he had to lie still for a while, fighting not to add something new to the foulness already around him. After several long, slow breaths, he managed to get enough muscles to respond to push himself up to sitting.

He was in a concrete chamber. Its size was hard to guess; most of the room was lost in shadow, and as weak as the light was, that meant very little. This place could be a city, or it could be barely more than a tomb.

He pushed the latter thought away.

Sam stumbled to his feet. His head struck concrete and he nearly pitched forward again; groping, he found that he'd awoken in a sort of alcove. A pipe let out into it, stopped with concrete. His fingers came away wet when he touched it. The source of the puddle, probably. His shoes and one sock were gone.

Something oozed from the seams in the wall, collecting in thick bubbles and creeping in ribbons down the concrete. It looked like it should be wet, _had_ to be wet, but it didn't reflect the light in the way his brain told him it should. It took long seconds for him to work out that this was because it was the source of the light. The stuff was basically reddish orange, streaked with brown, and glowing. It looked like nothing so much as faintly luminescent sewage.

Sam grimaced and turned away.

He moistened his split lip with a clumsy tongue and tried to make himself think. Jacob Dorner. They'd been looking for Jacob Dorner, missing two days. He remembered calling Dean from Dorner's apartment, empty-handed. Agreeing to meet back at the motel. Cutting through the park that lay between Dorner's gentrifying neighborhood and the one where their motel was. Stepping off the path by chance to let a kid tear by on a trick bike and seeing—seeing—

What?

He couldn't remember. It was important, he was sure, whatever it had been, but it was gone.

His pulse leapt sluggishly in his throat when he ran up against the black space in his memory. He'd stepped off the path. He'd seen—something. Something important that had drawn him off the path. Then someone or something had— What? Struck him? Gassed him? Whammied him? Why couldn't he remember? Why was his _head_ like this?

By the time he'd woken the first time, he'd already been in darkness. Being dragged. He remembered knowing he'd been taken, but not when, or where, or how. There'd been a grip on his ankles that had seemed to bite straight through his skin, down into bone. He searched his mind for clues from that brief window of consciousness, sounds, smells, sensations from the trip down here, but everything except the pain was lost in an oily, black murk. He'd just known that something was taking him _under_ , and beneath the panic, there'd been a paralyzing knowledge that that was _right_ — 

And the next time he'd woken, he'd been here. 

Sam swallowed. He couldn't stand here cowering against the wall, clinging to the light like a child. It was damned putrid light, for one thing. He'd have to explore by touch.

He started with himself. It took scant seconds to confirm what he'd known since he first awoke: whatever had taken him had left him no weapons or tools. Knife, gun, keys, paperclips, wallet, Swiss army knife, bottle opener—all gone. Sam hissed as he probed at his back. His fingers came away slick, and the skin across his back and sides stung like a bitch as it pulled. His overshirt had probably been lost somewhere as he'd been dragged, possibly his shoes and missing sock, too, but the rest of it had to have been taken deliberately. Whatever he was up against, it was capable of at least that much thought.

And had enough of a plan for him to bother.

Was it in here with him?

Beyond abrasions and bruising, he seemed uninjured. One hand on the wall, he edged out into the darkness to his right. One pace, two, three, four, five, six—his fingers abruptly jammed into a corner. He'd found the next wall. Brick. Not concrete. Drier than the wall he'd woken up against. He traced horizontal lines of crumbling grout until suddenly the groove under his fingers bent upwards. He paused and then groped rapidly over the surface. The bricks were set in a ring to hold—

More bricks. His heart sank. There'd been an aperture there once, but it was long since sealed. Narraganset Bay had the oldest sewer system in the country. God only knew how many pockets there were like this, walled off as one part of the system fell out of use and was forgotten.

Still, this place couldn't be walled off entirely. He'd been dragged here, not teleported. If there was a way in, there had to be a way out.

None of the seventeen before him had found it, though.

Whatever. This was not the time to wallow. He turned, straining his eyes for a sense of the room, and stopped. The place he'd started was on his left, but he thought he'd seen— Yes. There. Somewhere in the blackness to his right, more light.

It was impossible to tell what it was or even how far away it was, but he couldn't control the sudden jump in his pulse ( _you can,_ a voice whispered somewhere, _you can control all of those pathetic little reactions, it's easy, if you just remember—_ ) at the sight of it. Which was idiotic. Whatever had brought him here would hardly leave him a lantern, never mind an open window.

Or maybe it would. Whatever was at work here, it seemed to have taken him because he'd stumbled on something trying to trace Jacob Dorner. If it had a victim profile, Sam probably didn't fit it. Maybe the culprit would have realized that once it got him back here. Maybe it would have lost interest. Maybe it had just dropped him. Maybe he'd see Dean again in a matter of hours.

The thoughts flashed through his mind before he could prevent them, stupid and quickly suppressed. He, of all people, should have grown out of hoping for luck by now.

He looked for the indistinct light again. It was still there.

Cautiously he started towards it. His movements were still clumsy with cold and stupor, but he felt his way over the floor with small steps. Was the light getting closer, already? Closer, yeah, but no brighter. The darkness pressed in on him like a material thing. Raspy concrete, grit, water under the pads of his feet, water and stuff too slippery to be water—

Vertigo rolled up out of the murk in his head, obliterating what sense he had of up and down mid-stride. He stepped out into nothing.

He went down hard and ugly. Pain blossomed along his arms, shins, and jaw as he body-surfed what felt like a rock slope to land abruptly against a concrete edge that drove the air from his body. He made no sound. Keeping silent was reflex, to keep from giving his position away to anything in here with him, but probably pointless: something had made a clatter when he'd landed. Lying there in the dark, Sam tried to work out the topology involved. He'd stepped off a ledge, tumbled downward, and was lying on an angular surface with his head lower than his feet. Stairs. The floor had dropped off into sewage-slick, oversized stairs.

Stairs weren't all he was lying on. Hard knobs dug into his abdomen, and his hand had closed instinctively on something. He knew the shape. It was a femur, sticky with traces of tissue. He heard rats chitter as they scattered away from his fall. 

Sam shut his eyes, unclenched his fingers, and, carefully, wiped his hand off on his jeans. 

Finally he pulled himself up and, defeated by the way the world lurched around him in the dark, crawled back up the stairs like a dog. He went back to the sickly light patch where he'd started, wrapped his arms around his knees, and let his head hang between them. Further exploration would have to wait. His head was just too fucked, and abrupt holes in the floor were probably among the more benign elements in his new lodgings. He was reasonably sure he was in here alone, though, so at least he'd accomplished that much. He tried again to remember what he'd seen to lead him here, what had happened after he'd stepped off the path in the park—when? Yesterday? Today? An hour ago?

The last thing he could remember clearly was jumping aside to avoid the teenager bearing down on him on her bike. But for that, he knew, he'd never have made it this far. He was here by accident, by the dumbest of dumb luck. The good news, then, was that Dean probably would not be following him.

The bad news, of course, was that Dean probably would not be following him.

Sam lifted his head and looked out into the darkness. He could hear nothing but the rats.

Screw it. If there was something in here with him, its plans didn't include immediately killing him, and it would know he was awake by now, anyway. He gave into nature and weakness.

"Dean?" he called.

His voice sounded pathetic in his own ears. It echoed back to him unanswered. Another _plink_ from somewhere. Sam laid his cheek against his knees and shut his eyes. Then:

"Hello?"

Sam jerked his head up. The voice was hoarse, male, unfamiliar. It had come from somewhere up on his left and had a faraway quality, as if he were hearing it down a pipe. It sounded like its owner had already tried screaming.

He heaved himself back up onto his knees. "Jacob Dorner?"

"Oh, thank God," the voice babbled. "Thank God, thank God, thank God. You gotta get me out of here, man, I am _so ready_ to get out of here."

Sam grinned despite himself. Jacob Dorner had been missing two days when he and Dean had arrived in Providence, and he was still alive now. With two of them, their chances of finding a way out of here went up. And for once, Sam hadn't been too late.

"Hang on, Jacob, okay?" he called, staggering towards where he thought he'd heard the voice, one hand on the wall. "Are you hurt? Are you—"

"Shut _up!"_ a woman's voice hissed. "Keep it down!"

Sam had only a moment to be stunned. It made sense for Jacob Dorner to be alive; he'd been missing for a matter of days. But the one before him, Lindsey Chase, had gone months before, _couldn't_ still be—

Then something started to scream.

* * *

_Canaan, Vermont, two days previously_

.  
.

"Disappearances. In Rhode Island. Because that ended so well last time."

"Dean."

"Yeah, Sammy, sign me right the hell up for more of that. Oh. Wait. Sorry, got a little turned around, there; I meant no."

"This isn't the same," Sam snapped.

Dean tossed the newspaper Sam had handed him onto the table. "Really? Because man, the opening paragraph is giving me deja vu."

"Will you calm down? Bristol is on the other side of the bay. Providence is a big town, Dean. Odds against us running into anyone from… from that other job are astronomical."

Dean ran his hands down his face and let them drop into his lap. He stared up at Sam. "You never learn, do you?"

Sam bridled at that, but he kept his voice level. "I've learned a thing or two. Thanks for asking."

"Kind of my point, Sam!"

"Look, I get that you're worried about me scratching the—the _wall_ , or whatever, but the last time I was in Providence was in 2007. With you. Remember?"

It was plain that remembering took Dean several seconds, but he still came back with, "That you know of."

"You're being irrational. It's a—well, all right, it's not a _big_ state, but it is still an entire U.S. state, and we can't treat the whole thing like it's radioactive. What am I supposed to do, ignore every job in the country because I might have passed through somewhere nearby with Samuel before?"

Dean stood from the motel room table and crossed to the minifridge. "That's a thought." He came up with a beer and popped the cap with his ring. "We could go south. All the way south. The cold sucks, and there's shit to hunt in Mexico."

"You don't speak Spanish, Dean."

" _Yo quiero Taco Bell._ "

"Oh, my God, that isn't— You know what, I'm not doing this. I don't know what your problem is, but I'm not moving to Mexico. We're in the neighborhood, and this goes back far enough that it could be our kind of thing. We should check it out. Dad would."

It was a dirty move, but other than glaring, Dean didn't comment on it. He shoved the beer back in the fridge (uncovered), snagged his keys from the table, slung his jacket over his shoulders, and slammed the door behind him. Sam listened for the sound of the Impala's engine turning over, but it didn't come. Dean couldn't go far on foot and, given how cold a spring northern Vermont was having, he probably wouldn't be long about it. Sam settled in to wait.

He knew he was going to win this. He probably already had. Not because of the force of his arguments, but because Dean had been restless with the task of dealing with Rufus's empty house since before they'd even gotten there, and because as much as he couldn't seem to find one he liked the taste of, Dean hunted compulsively, these days. Not obsessively, not rabidly, not cramming as many kills into the shortest space possible the way he had when he'd first gotten back from Hell—and certainly nothing like what Sam had been able to reconstruct of the way he'd hunted without a soul—but steadily. Pace seemed unimportant, so long as Dean was hunting _something_. Sam tried not to think too hard about exactly what exactly Dean was trying to forget, and that effort had nothing to do with Dean's warnings about scratching Death's wall.

Yet here Dean was, resisting a hunt. Except, of course, that it wasn't the hunt Dean had a problem with. Sam had lost count of how many times Dean had tried to pry Sam off his side with _Take it easy, you just got back_ or _Hey, Bobby heard of this library out in Wyoming, you should go geek out for a while_ or _Believe me when I tell you that the things you don't know could kill you_. Like any of that had ever mattered before, like Sam was infirm. Perhaps just a bit like when Sam spoke, whether to say _I'm fine, actually_ or _Hey, there's a vampire nest in the next state_ , Dean didn't really hear him. Like Sam wasn't quite real.

And maybe those were the times when, just for a moment, Sam's world wavered.

But Dean needed to be hunting, and Sam refused to stop hunting, so, seeming almost baffled, and maybe faintly pissed, Dean carried on hunting with Sam. Sam knew the unspoken threat making Dean bend: that if Dean didn't, Sam would simply hunt alone. Sam told himself that this was all in Dean's head.

They were not hunting now, though. They were outside Canaan, Vermont, because Bobby would not come. They'd buried Rufus, but there was still his material ghost to put to rest. When hunters died, it was better not to leave their homes to fall into the hands of unsuspecting civilians. There was no telling what sort of artifacts or sensitive information might be in there, and anyway, hunters tended to booby trap their places. Sam and Dean knew that. Bobby knew that. But no matter what updates they'd left on Bobby's answering machine, he'd stayed where he was: in Sioux Falls, buried in books and hellishly bad whiskey. Grief had strange effects on people, sometimes.

Secretly, guiltily, Sam was glad. He had liked Rufus. He'd had a fundamental indifference to Sam and Dean that Sam had found comforting. Getting to see the material traces of his life, had been… nice. Sam had always known that Rufus was a good hunter and had suspected he'd been a truly great researcher, but the same personal indifference Sam had liked about the man had meant he couldn't simply invite himself into Rufus's library the way he did Bobby's. No quantity of Johnnie Walker Blue, it had been clear, would have been payment enough for _that_. Turned out, there was good stuff in there. Very good. Sam was looking forward to getting to read it.

If he could ever take the time without Dean ditching him. For the most solicitous of reasons, of course.

Sam emptied his half of the drawers into his duffel and then, shrugging, did Dean's. The alarm clock between the beds (concave in the middle, upholstered in a fetching green and purple houndstooth) read 9:49. After 11:00, they'd have to pay for another night. Not long to wait, then.

Sure enough, the tide of checkout brought Dean back at around twenty past ten, scowling and carrying a paper sack of road supplies. Sam had already put up the laptop and tipped out the maid.

Dean dumped the sack on the table, went to the fridge, withdrew the beer, took a swig, and made a face. He then crossed to the bathroom and dumped the flat beer into the toilet. Sam waited patiently for the sound of the bottle hitting the bottom of the trash can.

The sight of their duffels, sitting tidily beside the table, brought Dean up short. He paused, took stock of the room, narrowed his eyes, and finally looked at Sam. Sam stared back. Dean's mouth twisted in an emotion Sam would have been hard pressed to identify.

"Fine, where is this fucking hunt, exactly?"

Sam told him in the car. Dean had always preferred to hear things he didn't like while he was moving.


	2. if you should go skating

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wasn't alone. There were people alive down here. This was good news.
> 
> Probably.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry this took so long. Although nothing's much changed in my conception of the plot (I do have one! No, really!), my approach to this fic took a hard left turn, and then another, and then several more. Now that I've committed to a way to tell this story—for better or worse—I hope I can get the material out faster.

Between a five-car pile-up on I-95 and the fact that Dean wasn't in any particular hurry to get there, they didn't make it into Providence until almost six o'clock. Their first stop was a bar. There was a reason for this. Working a case right next to a town where one of them was wanted for a) beating a cop half to death and b) escaping from jail after being arrested for beating a cop half to death was some grade-A dumbass bullshit. Dean had no broad philosophical objections to doing deeply stupid things, but he refused to do them on an empty stomach.

Since it was Sam's fault they were here at all, Dean made him get the first round and their food. He'd probably end up with a veggie burger or something that way, but he wanted a moment to check in with Bobby. At some point, it had become habit to copy Bobby on their movements, and he knew without having to ask that Sam would never have initiated the call himself.

He knew it, and he hated it. For extra credit, he even tried to pretend he didn't understand it.

The call rang to voice mail, just like the previous dozen had. _"This is Robert Singer. Don't bother leaving a message, because you shouldn't have this number. If you're going to do it anyway, keep it brief."_

"Hey, Bobby." Dean sat at a corner table and surveyed a mural of a buxom half-woman, half-hot dog mermaid-type-thing lying in a bun and ecstatically squirting ketchup over one breast, mustard over the other. "Just FYI, we finished up at Rufus's. Grabbed some bits and pieces, cleaned up the curse boxes, dealt with the death traps. Should be safe for civilians in there, now." Dean cleared his throat. "So, anyway, me and Sam are down in Providence, gonna check out some missing persons. Probably nothing, but since we were in the neighborhood." The answering machine crackled static back at him. "Just… take a shower or something, alright? You stink."

He hung up. Bobby _did_ stink right now. Dean didn't have to be within a thousand mile radius of the man to know that much.

Sam reappeared from the crowd around the bar just as Dean was pocketing his cell. He slid a longneck across the table to Dean and gestured with his chin.

"Bobby?" he asked. Dean hated the fake casualness in his tone.

"Voice mail, again."

Sam nodded, sat, drank from his beer, avoided meeting Dean's eyes. Dean knew there was more coming. "Think he's okay?" Sam asked finally.

What Dean wanted to say was, _Yes. He's okay. You're okay. I'm okay. We're all okay together. We're a hell of a lot more okay than we have any right to be, despite everything, so stop tiptoeing around each other before we all stop being okay, because we broke the goddamned world once so what's a little attempted murder between friends?_

What he said was, "Yeah, if his liver's survived this long, I'm sure this won't get him."

One side of Sam's mouth lifted humorlessly in acknowledgment.

Bobby hadn't so much asked Sam and Dean to pack up Rufus's house as he had expelled them from his, so that he could research obsessively and pretend it wasn't about Rufus free from interruption. He'd done it in this reality and in the one Balthazar had altered. In this reality, though, he didn't have Ellen and Jo to look out for him in their stead, and Dean was more concerned than he cared to admit. Sam was, too, that was plain, but communication between him and Bobby remained stilted and minimal. If Dean didn't know better, he would have said Sam seemed even guiltier since they'd buried Rufus, and he was too tired to try to work out what was going on with that.

They needed a vacation. He'd yet to see any palm trees or bikinis in this town, either.

"So how many victims have you found, exactly?" Dean said, more because the way Sam kept turning his beer bottle between his fingers was driving him nuts than because he really wanted to think about the case right now.

That seemed to pull Sam back to himself some. "Twenty-six. I think. I mean, I know it's not a lot to go on. But superficially, at least, they all sound pretty similar."

"Remind me what your criteria for that were, again?"

Sam didn't rise to it. "Unsolved missing persons who all just vanished. No signs of break-in, no signs of struggle, no known motives for leaving, no notice to anybody, no signs of financial preparation, no toothbrushes packed, no suspects, no physical evidence of any kind, nothing. All different ages and occupations. One day, these people were just gone."

Assuming a positive from a whole lot of negatives, in other words. It was a bare wisp of a pattern. And yet it could be something. Sam had a gift for finding the hairline cracks that turned out to be fault lines.

Lately, that particular gift made Dean nervous.

"Did the vics all cross paths anywhere?"

They paused the conversation when the waitress delivered their food, chili dogs, good and sloppy. Dean noted that his came piled with enough onions to sink a ship; Sam must be feeling contrite. That or there was a really oblique comment in there somewhere about Dean's foul mood outranking onion breath. Hard to tell with Sam.

After a couple of minutes to start in on the dogs, Sam resumed. "Not that I can tell, but it's going to be hard to say for sure. I managed to hack police reports on a couple of the more recent ones earlier, but some of these cases are pretty old. Paper records only."

"People go missing like that all over the country, Sam. Even supposing they're all connected, what makes you think it's not just a serial killer?"

"Operating since 1963?"

Dean glanced up in surprise. "That far back?"

"Yep."

Dean considered. That there was anything supernatural here was still far from a lock; there could be two generations of human agents behind the disappearances—unlikely, but they'd run up against stranger—or there could be no connection between them at all. But the time line certainly made it weirder.

Something occurred to Dean. "When'd you find this case, anyway?"

"Last night. Noticed the headline, ran a quick search to see if it smelled like anything." He ate another bite of his chili dog, chewed, swallowed. Eventually his eyes drifted up under the weight of Dean's stare. "What?"

"So you just happened to run across a case next door to spider central? Total accident, nothing to do with checking up on what you did last year?"

"Exactly how much of an asshole are you going to be about this?" Sam asked, civilly.

"Forgive me if I'm not jumping for joy over working a case right on top of the one that gave you a grand mal seizure and almost got us both killed."

"Providence, Dean. State capital. Couple hundred thousand inhabitants. It's not 'right on top of' anything except more Providence."

"We are fifteen miles away from Bristol, Sam. I can hawk a loogie farther than that."

"You know the mileage between Bristol and Providence just off the top of your head?"

Dean bristled at the skepticism. "Look, maybe school wasn't my thing for most subjects, but geography? Geography I've got. I took first place in a geography bee when I was seven, thank you very much."

Sam blinked in surprise. "You did?"

"Yes." Dean dug resentfully into his cheese fries. "So don't give me any condescending bullcrap about how totally and amazingly safe this is."

Dean waited for the rejoinder, but none came. Finally he glanced up. Sam was gazing across the table at him with this sort of soft, dopey expression. "I never knew that," he said.

Dean glared. "Shut up."

"Seven?"

"Shut the fuck up."

"I wish I could remember that," Sam said, still with the doe-eyed shit.

It took physical effort for Dean to unclench his jaw. "Twenty-four hours," he said. "We give this thing a day. Then, when we don't find anything supernatural about it, we pack up go find a Monster Mash somewhere in SoCal. Deal?"

Sam shrugged. "Deal."

That was settled, then.

Dean should have felt better that Sam gave in so easily. He didn't.

* * *

Sam pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, took a deep breath, dropped them, and stared at the laptop screen. 1:48 a.m. Eight hours out of twenty-four gone, and he had approximately dick. He already regretted agreeing to Dean's ultimatum.

Or, hell, maybe he just regretted this whole trip. Providence was a regrettable town.

Some cases would break right open if you just tapped them in the right place. There'd be some convenient fact—a bizarre detail the responding officer had left out of his report because he'd just assumed he was going crazy, a place the victims had all visited, a shaman they'd all pissed off—just waiting for you to tug on it like a pull-tab and you'd basically be done except for the salting, burning, shooting, stabbing, disemboweling, decapitating, exhuming, burying, banishing, cleansing, exorcising, blessing, thieving, bombing, and/or chemical dissolution. The jobs worked themselves, practically.

Then there were the ones where extracting useful information was like trying to wring lucidity out of a septuagenarian Grateful Dead roadie.

This was shaping up to be one of the latter. Sam had been at this all night, and all he'd been able to find was crude personal data on these people that, if anything, only served to reinforce how little he had. Even focusing on the more recent names and their fresher cases, 

Jacob Dorner, 33. Missing two days. Pharmaceutical sales rep. BU alum on an athletic scholarship. Had lived alone; parents both living (in Florida); one sibling, deceased. Fraternal twin—a sister. Some freak gym accident when they were 18. Her obit and a short piece in the local paper had come up in Sam's preliminary searches on Jacob; he couldn't help wondering if they'd been close.

Lindsey Chase, 27. Missing almost five months. Home health aide with an elder care agency. One surviving stepparent (Connecticut) and a maternal aunt (local); no siblings. From the handful of police documents Sam had been able to find, it looked like the aunt, not the stepfather, had been the driving force in what efforts were made to search for Lindsey. But nothing had ever been found, and the aunt's calls to the police station had gradually petered out. The last one had been almost a month ago and took half a line to document in the case file.

Anthony Marquez, 57. Missing for eight months. Reasonably successful real estate investor, stereotypical hobbies of same, home down in East Greenwich. Married for 37 years (to the same wife, no less). He'd been just distinguished enough that the local papers had tried to make a big story out of his disappearance, but it had been hard going: no likely suspects had surfaced beyond the standard investigation of his immediate family, and no trace of mob connections, embezzlement, or crooked land banking, or bizarre schemes based in the Caymans had ever materialized. The most shocking thing police and journalists had been able to uncover about Marquez was how unobjectionable his finances had actually been, which probably explained the modesty of his fortune.

Brendan Whitmore, 25. Missing for just over a year. Desk clerk at a local hotel that seemed to have peaked in the 1960s. Both parents living (local), along with a brother (older, in Wisconsin) and a sister (younger, local). Little information was available on Brendan. Like Lindsey Chase, he belonged to what seemed to journalists to be a forgettable class, and the tenor of the interviews on file with the Providence PD suggested that his family were not particularly shocked at his disappearance. He'd been living with a girlfriend, but apparently she hadn't been passionate enough about him to notice he'd gone: he was reported missing by his family after a call from his workplace. Police had found nothing at the apartment that impressed them enough to record, and the girlfriend had moved out a few months later when the lease was up. Most of the follow-up calls made to the police about Brendan had been made by the sister.

Cara Pryor, 29. She, too, had been missing for just over a year. She'd moved to Providence for work two months before, something faceless and corporate. Newspaper reports of her were minimal; at first Sam assumed that this was because she was so new to town, but her tiny Iowa hometown, though apparently aware of her disappearance, ran it in a half-sentence blurb in an "other news" section on page four. Probably had kept to herself, then—no notable connections to raise a fuss. In contrast, her police file was nil on physical evidence but long on interviews and canvasses. They'd kept it quiet, but someone in the Providence PD had had reason to suspect foul play, then. Possibly they still did: the most recent interview, with the attendant at a gym she'd used, was dated just two months ago. Her parents were living in Iowa and had had nothing useful to offer the investigation.

Marian Daniels, 47. Missing twenty-two months. Divorced mother of three, office manager at Cap in Your Crown dentistry in Manton. Her three children had long since moved out of state to live with their father. She had no criminal record, an unremarkable credit record, and was, to all appearances, mourned by her family, her colleagues, and her local branch of MADD.

And so on. And on, all the way back to the JFK assassination. Ample facts, but all of them banal. And he couldn't find the common thread. Different ages, different genders, different ethnicities, different occupations, different tax brackets. They'd lived and worked all over the city—all over the Narragansett Bay area, in fact. They'd been loved, loathed, and everything in between.

There was, in fact, no reason whatever to suppose that a given supernatural entity had done anything to any of them, much less all of them.

In a fit of pique, Sam hit close-all on the browser tabs and slammed the laptop shut. Then he sat in darkness, because the blue tint of the screen had been the room's only light.

Dean was asleep. Sam could just barely hear his breathing, soft, regular. Better sleep than he'd been getting lately, then. Better than Sam could remember Dean getting since… since he'd returned. Not that that was a useful measure, _since he'd returned_ , because he'd only really returned a few months ago. It seemed unlikely that Dean had slept any better while he was sharing digs with the version of Sam that never slept and had used him as an experiment (just the once. Just the once that Dean knew about. Please, God, let it have been just the once). Before that, then? How had Dean slept with Lisa?

He didn't have the right to even wonder about that.

Sam let the dark and quiet sit on him, soothing his headache. He should actually be glad of Dean's ultimatum, he decided. It was going to give him an out. Dean was hung up on the times Sam had been in Bristol, across the bay, but Sam found that he was, to his own frustration, hung up on the time that he had actually been _here_ , in Providence, even though Dean seemed almost to have forgotten it outright. For a scant day or so, back then, before the lie showed through, it had been their first brush with angels.

Screw this town. The police stations all seemed to share one document scanner between them, the curb appeal was dismal, and some public-spirited individual really needed to swing by Brown with thermite and a masonry drill and deliver the world from that fucking motto. Sam had brought them here on a fool's errand. He should just admit that he'd dragged them here over nothing, go through the motions until the clock ran out, and let Dean drive them back out of here without a fight. He should.

He should just let it go, and let Dean think that, yeah, he'd cracked, that he was cracked, and that it was probably better for everyone not to take anything he said too seriously.

(Had Dean felt like this around Sam, back when he'd first gotten back from Hell?—No, don't think it, not the same, can't, no right—)

"Sam."

Sam started slightly. He twisted in his chair. Dean lay on his side, unmoving under the covers, eyes cracked and just visible in the ghost light that leaked in around the drapes from the parking lot.

"Go the fuck to sleep." Dean's eyes glittered in the dark for a moment longer, then shut again.

Sam watched him for a long moment. Then he stood, stripped, and folded his outer clothes away (no gore and no grave dirt, good for a second or third wearing). The numbers on the radio clock on the night stand were green. 2:17 a.m.

He peeled down the thin, plastic-slick comforter on his bed, climbed between the sheets, shut his eyes, and listened for Dean's breathing. He couldn't hear it anymore. Too light.

Slowly, carefully, but still with a quiet creak of springs, he turned onto his side and tried to empty his mind. He lay curled toward his brother. They'd be gone this time tomorrow. There was nothing here.

* * *

_Now_

.  
.

The screaming was wordless and thoughtless. For several seconds, Sam thought he was hearing some kind of animal, though he couldn't figure out which. Then he heard the second voice shriek through it:

"You _woke her up!_ You fucking _woke her up!"_

Sam wasn't sure he could have made himself heard even if he'd had an answer. The screaming obliterated the silence. It was relentless, battering itself to piece against the walls with barely enough time between blasts to believe that whoever was doing it was taking breaths. It drove right through his nasal bone and into his brain, making the fog there throb. Between the state of his head and just how loud it was, it was hard to say exactly where the screams were coming from, but it seemed almost like they came from somewhere above him.

"Well, I'm sorry!" Dorner shouted back. His voice was edged with hysteria. "Jesus, can't you shut her up?"

Apparently she could. A minute later, there was a muffled noise, and the screaming trailed off into sobbing. Sam felt queasy.

The silence—the relative quiet, anyway—was uncomfortable on just about every level. Sam shivered, pressed his eyes shut, and made himself breathe steadily. There were questions to ask, now. Obvious ones hanging right in front of him. It shouldn't have been so difficult to think of them. It shouldn't have been so difficult to think, period.

He wasn't alone. There were people alive down here. This was good news. Good.

Sam made his tongue work. "Are you Jacob Dorner?" he called, quietly.

There was a pause. Then, also quietly, "Yeah."

"Who else is there?"

"Please get me out," Jacob said instead of answering. "Please."

"Who's there?" Sam asked again.

There was a shuffling sound, perhaps someone moving closer to his voice. "I'm Lindsey." It was the woman who'd told them to be quiet; the fury was gone, and now her voice just sounded thin and exhausted. "I'm Lindsey."

"Lindsey, Jacob, I'm Sam."

"Are you going to get us out of here, or what?"—Jacob again.

Sam ignored him. "Lindsey, who else is in here?"

"He can't get us out," Lindsey said dully, answering Jacob, not Sam. "It brought him here same as us. I told you."

"My brother's looking for me, Lindsey," he said. "He'll find us."

"He won't."

Sam's headache ratcheted up a notch. This was not helping. Together, they might have a chance of escaping, but only if he could counter Lindsey's despair. He needed them believing that they had a future. "Yes, he will." He tried to make his voice firm; his body felt anything but. "He's looking for us now, and believe me, he won't give up."

"My aunt probably never gave up, either," she said viciously. Sam stayed silent and didn't tell her that, in fact, her aunt pretty much had. "She's probably been to everybody from the cops to the newspapers to Mulder and fucking Scully. Think your brother's going to be any different?"

"Trust me," said Sam, "we're different."

He shuddered and resisted the urge to wrap his arms around himself. The throbbing in his head had become rhythmic; it felt as if the air itself were flexing in on him, over and over, pressing on his eyes and his ears and his sinuses. An oily, prickly sensation skittered over his skin, like a hundred thousand burrowing mites. What they hell had whammied him that could make him feel like this?

The second woman was still crying, quietly. "Please, God," Jacob said, "you've got to get me out of here. Please."

"Lindsey." Sam put every ounce of authority and rationality he could into the word. _"Who's crying?"_

At first, Sam thought she wasn't going to answer him. Finally she said, "Marian something. That's all I know."

It took Sam a very long time to make his thoughts work. For a while the information just sat there in his mind. Then, almost unconsciously, he began to count backwards through the names. Jacob, Lindsey, Anthony, Brendan, Marian. Marian Daniels, number twelve of seventeen.

She'd been gone almost two years.

Before he could even formulate his next question, the air went suddenly charged. Electricity—not a metaphor; the real deal—zinged through his nerves thin and sharp as a needle. The pounding behind his eyes intensified and it seemed as if the darkness rippled into and through him, like a living, infecting thing.

The walls began to bleed.

Had it not been so dark, Sam might not have seen it. The glowing patch beside his head seemed to intensify; then, as he watched, he realized that the dark filaments in the glowing fluid seemed to be spooling faster, curling, elongating into fattening bubbles of ooze. More of whatever the substance was being forced between the concrete seams. Fat, sickly drops welled up, distended, and dripped slowly down the surface of the wall. Sam heard Jacob Dorner give one hoarse shout.

Cold slammed into the air.

Somewhere, Marian Daniels was still crying. Sam realized suddenly that there were words hitched in between the sobs:

"It's coming. It's coming. It's coming."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I have nothing against Brown University. I've never even been there, and come to think of it, I don't think I know any Brunonians; I just needed a throwaway line for Sam to be grouchy about Providence. The motto he's pissed off about, by the way, is _In Deo Speramus_ —In God We Hope. Academic pros and cons aside, Sam is understandably a little bitter.
> 
> I've taken liberties with the Narragansett Bay sewer system and will take plenty more. Providence's sewers are among the oldest (and coolest) in the nation, though, even if there's no supernatural horror lurking in them. Probably.


	3. the thin ice of modern life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam thinks he knows what he's fighting. Dean thinks he knows how to get his brother out in one piece. They're both wrong.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So many apologies to the residents of Providence, RI. I don't know shit about that town.

"Jacob! Jacob, hang on!"

Sam tried to stand, but the floor pitched and rolled. "Jacob, look for iron!"

A long, thin sound snaked out of the air. It sounded like nothing so much as a seething pipe, but human. Horribly human. It waned into silence.

"Jacob?" Sam found purchase on the wall. "Is it in there with you? Can you see it?"

The pounding had gone from his sinuses, suddenly, and the sharp cold was receding. But Sam could still feel the prickling across his skin, and the air was made up of slow, syrupy waves of wrongness. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Water trickling; rats scratching; Marian sobbing; no sound at all from Jacob.

"He can't hear you," Lindsey said. She might have been discussing the weather.

"Is he— Did it kill him? Where are you? Are you in the same room as Jacob? Can you see what's happening?"

"Kill him? No. It's just visiting."

Sam tried that sentence from every angle. "What?"

"It came to visit him." Some of the viciousness was creeping back into her voice. "I told him it would. And it'll visit you before long, too."

"What do you mean?"

"It visits us. It's what we're here for, I guess. I don't know. It's not _human._ "

Sam leaned against the wall and shut his eyes. It made barely any difference to what he could see. "Yeah, I know. It's a spirit. A ghost."

She snorted.

"Lindsey, I'm serious," he said tiredly. "I don't know what kind, and I don't know how the hell it's doing what it's doing, but it's definitely a spirit. I've felt that kind of cold too many times before not to know. My brother and I—we hunt them."

"Wow. Most people have to be down here ages to get as crazy as you."

"Your name is Lindsey Chase." Talking was difficult; his tongue felt thick in his mouth, like he might throw up at any moment. "You're from Federal Hill. You're a geriatric caregiver. Your aunt is Mildred Shandy. You've been gone almost five months."

She didn't answer for a while. Then, finally: "Five months?"

Sam let his breath out. "Yeah. Sorry."

Her voice was tiny. "Is Marmee okay?"

Presumably that was her aunt. Kind of a delicate question, under the circumstances. _She's peachy, Linds; called the police station every day for a while, but, y'know, life goes on, and now your room's a scrapbooking studio. Looks like a pretty sweet set-up._ "Yeah, Lindsey, she's fine, but I still need to know what's going on. The ghost—whatever—what did it do to Jacob?"

"It's doing it right now. It's— I can't explain. It _visits_ you."

Sam's temper flared. That wasn't an answer, and she wasn't even trying. "I can't help you if you won't talk to me."

"You can't help me no matter what."

For several minutes, something had been nagging at him. All at once he realized that it was the blank space in the conversation where Marian Daniels should have been. If Lindsey couldn't or wouldn't give him answers, maybe she would. "Marian?" he called. "Marian, what's it doing? What's it look like? Please, answer me! We need to help Jacob!"

"She doesn't talk." Lindsey's voice was flat again. "Not anymore."

Sam ignored her. "Marian, I'm Sam Winchester. Can you hear me?"

Nothing.

He was buried alive. The air was so thick with malevolent energy that he could barely breathe. There were at least other people down here. None of them had ever gotten out, and they'd had ample opportunity to try.

_Dean._

Before he could stop it, Sam found himself retching. The cold and the nausea were too much, and his body shook with the effort of holding himself up against the wall. Distantly, he heard Lindsey's voice, laden with incredulity and disgust: "Did you just _puke_? Great. That's great. At this rate, you'll last even less time than the last one."

Sam spat and turned away from the pile. He'd spattered his bare foot with his own vomit and he had corpse residue under his fingernails and this place was literally awash in shit but he couldn't think about any of that right now, no time, oh, God, he needed to wash his hands. _Dean. Dean._

"Lindsey, this is important. I need to know about the… thing that took us. You must have seen it. Heard it. Something. I think it's probably a spirit, but there are all kinds of different spirits even if I'm right." He tried to make his voice compassionate, reasonable. "Look, even if I am a nutcase, what do you have to lose?"

Her voice, when it came, was hesitant, almost childlike. Her moods seem to swing like a weather vane. "It— I don't know, okay? It just—it just comes and lies down in you. I used to think it would be awesome to be able to walk through walls, you know, when I watched cartoons as a kid. It isn't. It's horrible. And even when it takes you all the way out, _outside_ , it's never like you're out. Because you aren't. For a long time I used to think, 'I'm gonna get out this time. If I can just shake it off of me while it's riding me outside….' But then I come to and I'm right back here. Never left. Because it's riding you, but you're riding in it more."

Sam tried to sift through her fragmentary explanation. "It possesses you?"

"Call it whatever you want."

None of it made sense. Ghosts kidnapped people, yes; ghosts possessed people, yes; but they didn't keep people as pets, and no amount of supernatural possession would let someone with a flesh-and-blood body walk through a concrete wall without becoming mostly blood and nothing recognizable as flesh. She had to mean some sort of mental trip, then. A ghost-induced dream. But why? What did a ghost need a body for if it wasn't _using_ the body? What the hell was this thing doing?

Lindsey seemed very confident that he was going to find out.

"Spirits, they all want something. What does it want?"

"Don't you think I've asked it?" she broke out. "It doesn't listen. I'm not sure it can. It doesn't listen, doesn't talk. It's like Marian, but worse."

Sam felt his way along the wall, moving unsteadily towards the sound of her voice. "It takes you over. You must have gotten some kind of a sense while it was possessing you, some feeling."

_Plink. Plink._

"Lindsey?"

"It's looking for something," she said finally.

He had to act. Had to get these people out of here, had to get back to Dean. First think he had to figure out this room. Arm himself, if he could. Maybe one of the skeletons in here had left something. Tools, weapons, metal fragments, something, anything. Then he'd figure out how to get to Jacob and Lindsey and Marian. Then… then…

The world tipped to the side. He felt the wall scrape over his ribs, then the floor under his cheek. He had about enough time to hope he hadn't gone down in his vomit before he lost consciousness.

* * *

_One day prior_

.  
.

Dean flexed his hand over the grip of his Colt and advanced through the dark. The street was too quiet.

He signaled with his free hand, a nearly invisible gesture that was all they ever needed between them. But Sam was already a dozen feet up the alley, disappearing through the warehouse's side door.

How had he gotten so far ahead?

Dean chased after him, got the door open, and swung around into the thicker darkness of the warehouse. High windows let in red light that didn't penetrate the murk. He could just barely see Sam across the huge room, jogging into the pitch-black guts of the place, weapon out. Dean swore silently and followed.

The warehouse was a labyrinth. Offices, corridors, dead machines. Dean could barely keep Sam in sight; there was no time to ask what he'd seen, what they were running towards. Then he rounded a corner and Sam was gone. The dull red exit sign showed nothing but empty hallway. Dean pulled up short. He listened, straining—there. Muffled footfalls in a stairwell.

Then he was tumbling out the door at the bottom of the stairs and out into the cool moonlight. Sam's back was pale in his jacket, away down the road.

Unease stirred in the pit of Dean's stomach as he pursued. They were supposed to be chasing _it_ , but anything could have happened in the blank stretch of the warehouse. It could have circled around behind them. There was no way to know.

The dark street gained a sidewalk; then trees; then houses. The houses firmed up. White clapboard, white mailboxes, gray shutters, black lawns. Windows were dark. Everything was still. No cars anywhere. Dean just about caught up to Sam, and the disquiet he felt eased slightly. But then he realized that he didn't know where the hell they were.

Dean had a stellar sense of direction. He could navigate between any two U.S. cities without once using a major highway, but he always felt just a little bit turned around in subdivisions. Everything looked the same in a deep way that overrode the helpful street signs and he'd never gotten used to it, the whole year. They were like that place in that book Sammy had liked when he was little, the one with the girl and the not-witches and the tesseract. That place where the kids bounced balls and screamed.

Didn't that book have angels in it?

Sam disappeared around the corner of a house.

He was walking at least as fast as Sam, but he kept losing the ground he gained. His stomach churned. He passed underneath a streetlight, and its rays pounded into his skull, violently, as violently as the rushing blood and pulsing hearts all around him pounded on his ears. Had it gotten behind them? He hoped so. Whatever it was, he'd drain it dry—

Then he was out of the streetlight and out of the chaos, cutting across a lawn. The grass was cool and wet and silent. 

Sam disappeared around a hedge.

This house had its porch light on. Lisa stood in the door; when she saw Dean, she put her arm around Ben, turned, and vanished into the darkened house. At the same instant, Dean saw a flash of tan jacket at the open garage door. Sam. _No._ Dean's pulse jumped in his throat and he ran, caught the door before it had even closed—

—but Sam wasn't going through the door into the house. He was going out by the side door. The latch of the interior door clicked; it swung just barely open, showing a sliver of the kitchen beyond. Dean vaulted over the trunk of Lisa's sedan after Sam.

It could be anywhere, by now. It could be behind them instead of in front of them and Lisa's kitchen door was open. Sam passed through a pale garden gate.

Back onto the sidewalk. Streetlights were winking out, one by one. Dean chased after his brother.

He put on a burst of speed until Sam was only a few yards ahead. "Sam!" he hissed, loud as he dared. Sam didn't hear him..

A rushing came over the tops of the trees. Dean ran, but felt his stomach plummet as he realized he wasn't trying to catch up. The house ahead sat in a bare lawn. A poisonous golden glow seeped around the edges of the door as they approached it.

_"Sam!"_

Sam disappeared through the door without looking back. The light grew in the windows.

It grew, and grew—

.

Dean started awake.

It was the sickening hypnic jerk that brought him to with the metallic taste of fear in his mouth but translated into barely a twitch of outward motion. He hated waking up this way. Whatever nightmare had forced him out of itself always slammed the door after him, as gone from his memory as if it had never been recorded, but somehow it was still worse this way than when he woke gasping and the pictures drenched his mind for days.

He lay, eyes still closed, feeling almost paralyzed for several long seconds. There wasn't enough warmth of comfort in this bed to be worth trying to hang onto, though, so finally he let his eyes slit open.

The opposite bed was empty.

Dean sat up and threw off the covers, right hand closing around the .45 under his pillow. "Sam?"

But he knew already that the room was empty. For a ludicrous moment, his pulse spiked. Then he saw the note on the nightstand, sticking up in a little folded tent. He picked it up and thunked the .45 down in its place. _Going to Brown cops @ vic's apt this a.m. check your email._ Right. The radio clock read 7:17. Dean stared balefully at Sam's military-neat bed, made more tightly than the maids had ever done it. The asshole had gotten dressed, made his bed, and left, and Dean hadn't even woken up. That was a thing that had apparently happened and therefore could happen again.

"Jesus," Dean muttered. He dragged his forearm across his face. "Why the fuck are we _here_."

Didn't matter. Didn't matter that this whole town gave him the heebs, either. Just a few more hours to make it through.

* * *

Sam held a pen poised over his steno pad. "So how well would you say you know Jacob?"

"Uhhh…." Coach Darden Babcock inserted a fingertip into his ear and rotated it. Twenty yards out from the dock on which they stood, a long, needle-like boat shot past, oars flashing. "Still see him at races from time to time, but it's been ten years since I coached him, you know? I guess I know him medium-well."

"Medium-well," Sam repeated.

"Yuh-huh."

"And about how well is that?"

Babcock looked faintly perplexed. Sam didn't think it was the question; it seemed to be more or less permanent. "I guess I remember him better than I might have because of what happened to his sister. She died," he added helpfully. "Summer before he started here. We were all real worried about him, he was a top thirty sculler, but he did okay."

"So what was he like?"

"Good kid. Popular. Kind of edgy that first semester, but like, fair enough, right? Anyway, he kept up with the team, kept up with his schoolwork, and he seemed better after that first break. More, uh, confident, you know? Outgoing. Real confident guy, real sociable. _KIRSCHMAN!"_

Sam jumped. Babcock screamed across the water, face purple: _"WHY IS YOUR GUT OUT? ARE YOU PREGNANT? DID YOU EAT YOUR COXSWAIN? SUCK IT IN AND ROW!"_

Babcock turned back to Sam, wide-eyed and mild, veins deflating in his temples. Sam cleared his throat. "Um. So, um. He was well liked?"

"Oh, yeah."

"What about enemies? Grudges?" He kept his expression as neutral as possible. "Any strange behaviors, untoward interests?"

"Oh, nah."

"So he was solid and dependable and popular. Who was close to him?"

"Oh, I dunno."

Sam counted to ten. He'd been getting answers of this caliber all morning, and he found himself wrestling with an unfamiliar itch to just start shooting people in the kneecaps and see what happened.

Jacob Dorner, everyone agreed, was a popular guy. Confident. Fun. Good at parties. He had bosses and coworkers who all hoped he was okay, wherever he was, because he was a great guy, you know, competitive but a real team player. He had rowing buddies at a mid-priced boat club who considered him first or at least second choice for inviting along on any sort of outdoor endeavor. He had a string of ex-girlfriends who remembered him as fun to go out with, okay in bed, and sad but gracious when they all decided to move on. He had phone records full of acquaintances who all agreed that he was absolutely the guy you wanted to help you move a couch. He had a coffee shop downstairs from his office where the barista remembered him as a regular and a good tipper.

What he did not seem to have was any close friends at all. No one who could say why he might have disappeared, where he might have gone, whether he believed in God, where he bought his clothes, if he'd been afraid of anything. His most recent girlfriend seemed genuinely upset that he was missing and likely dead, but had never lived with him and couldn't even remember what they'd liked to talk about. Did he have any hobbies, aside from rowing? Probably, said the girlfriend. Did he have any routines? Yes, she knew that he jogged most mornings and hit the gym most afternoons. Did she know what routes, what gym? No, Jacob had liked to go alone. Did he ever say, do, or mention anything weird? Anything at all? No. Never. Completely normal.

No one was completely normal to the people who truly knew them. But no one seemed to know Jacob Dorner that well.

If Sam's attention had been drawn to Jacob as an individual, rather than as one name in a pattern, he'd have probably focused on his sister's death. It was the one thing in the man's blandly upper-middle life that had not gone to plan. The only real thing, Sam found himself thinking, that had ever happened to him at all, until he'd gone missing.

"What can you tell me about the sister?" he asked on impulse. "Did Jacob ever seem…" He spread his hands and kept his expression innocent. "…haunted by her death?"

Babcock scritched at the side of his ball cap. "Uh. Not really?" he offered. "He took it better than I would've taken a thing like that. She was a rower, too, real, real gifted, had a scholarship here just like her brother. They used to pull together, so I guess they were pretty close, think she was his twin. He only ever talked about her once—PORT PRESSURE! _PORT PRESSURE, YOU HOG FELCHERS!"_

Sam waited for Babcock's complexion to return to normal. "What did he say?"

"Not much. See, Jacob was good, but he was never going to go pro. But it didn't seem to bother him, and most kids, that would bother them. Like, they all have the drive, but only so long as they think they're going to go to the Olympics some day. Then they lose focus and quit on you when it doesn't shape up that way. Not Jacob. So I asked him where he got that kind of sportsmanship at his age, and he told me that after watching his sister go like that, nothing else seemed that significant."

Sam paused. "Wait a minute. He watched her die?"

"Messed up, right? They were working out together. Some sort of accident with the weights, or something. She got trapped, or something. I don't even know where I heard that much about it, someone in admissions probably, it sure wasn't from Jacob. That one time was about the most he ever talked about her."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

"Mr. Babcock, when's the last time you saw Jacob?"

"He came out for the alumni erg sprints in February. Hey." He brightened. "His times were terrible. Maybe something was wrong?"

Sam stared at him. "That— That could be, I guess." His phone vibrated in his pocket. "Thanks for your time, Mr. Babcock."

"Yeah, no problem. _DAVIES!"_

Sam hastened away from the docks before he picked up the call, the phone buzzing irritably the while. He didn't bother to look at the caller ID. "Hey."

"Jesus, finally. Jerk it in the shower like a normal workaholic "

Sam glared at a passing squirrel. "I was just wrapping up an interview," he told Dean, and asked, pointedly, "You have something?"

"Got a great big pile of squat. Been working my way through the info you emailed; hit up the Fourth District station to see what I could get on the one before Dorner, Nurse Lindsey. They're not as tight-assed about it if you want to poke around in the stale stuff."

"Good thinking."

"Yeah, except nothing they forked over tells us anything we didn't already know. So do you want to get some grub, or what?"

Sam started to accept, then remembered that Dean had them on a timetable. Dean had them on a timetable, and he was trying to find every little way he could to run down the clock and get them out of this town without ever getting any real work done, and he wasn't even being subtle about it.

He could say something. He could not say something, but refuse to go and instead use every agreed-upon hour to work. That was probably what he should do. But instead he said, "Yeah, sure. But give me a couple of hours; you can pick me up at the library here." And he rattled off the address for the Rockefeller library, ignored Dean grousing about _What am I, your chauffeur?_ , and jogged the last few yards to catch the campus shuttle that was just pulling in up ahead.

Dean didn't think that Sam knew. Dean never did, when he tried to make Sam's decisions for him.

* * *

"Hot wieners," Dean said happily.

College Hill was lousy with restaurants, but Dean had rejected all of them on the grounds that if they had to be here, they weren't leaving without taking time to appreciate Providence's one contribution to higher culture: Olneyville NY System. There was a location a short walk away from Jacob Dorner's apartment, so Sam went with it.

"So still no overlaps between these people?" Dean asked as they joined the line to order. "Nothing in common at all that could tell us what we're looking for, here?"

Two hours in the library had turned twenty-six names into seventeen. Of the other nine, Sam had eventually been able to find some likely trace: bodies that turned up states away, hints of new lives started across the country. And it was possible that the remaining cases had explanations that were just as mundane. Still, he couldn't let go of the thoroughness and abruptness with which those seventeen had vanished. Something else nagged at him, too: plotting the frequency of disappearances gave not a random distribution, not a line, but an exponential curve.

They were being taken faster.

"Not yet. But there's something, Dean. We just have to keep digging."

"We've got…" Dean checked the time on his phone. "…six hours to wrap this one, Sammy. Just a reminder."

"Six hours to find evidence of supernatural involvement. Just a reminder."

"I'm telling you, Sam, I've been all over those files and I just don't see anything. There isn't even one place where they all went missing from for us to check out." They arrived at the front of the line and Dean leaned against the counter, xylophoning his knuckles against the edge of the formica. "Hey, yeah, uh, gimme a Coke and three hot wieners, please."

The old, kind of frighteningly intense guy behind the register scrawled on a ticket. "How you want 'em dressed?"

"All the way."

The man nodded curtly, like this was the only correct answer.

"Sure you want to take those hot wieners all the way, Dean?" Sam asked blandly.

"Seriously? You drag me along on the world's most bullshit case and you're going to begrudge me some onions?"

Fucking with Dean was always the most fun when Dean didn't even catch on.

The wiener man gave Sam the unamused look of someone who's heard the same joke every day for forty years. Sam gave his order (salad and a wiener, undressed, evidently not the correct answer) and they headed for a table. "If they didn't all go missing from the same place, then they probably weren't victims of opportunity," Sam said, sliding into the booth across from Dean. "They were chosen. If they were chosen, there had to be criteria. There's _something_ connecting them."

"Yeah, but is it a supernatural something?"

"Might be. Found out something interesting about Jacob Dorner just before you called. Remember that he had a sister who died? Apparently he watched it happen. And apparently, it was on the freaky side. She was benching and the bar slipped, crushed her throat. This girl was a serious rower; she could probably bench as much as you"—Dean snorted.—"and she definitely knew basic safety protocols. Jacob basically never talked about it to anyone. Not to his parents, not to his friends, not to his coaches. Maybe he saw something."

"Okay, I can see why I'd care about this if we were investigating _her_ death, but we aren't. Didn't even happen in the same state. You're reaching, bro."

"Yeah, okay, admittedly, but as far as the public record goes, it's the weirdest thing ever to happen to any of them." Sam shrugged. "Maybe if we dig far enough, we'll find something similar on all of them. Maybe it's about loss."

"So you're thinking, what—some kind of curse?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"That's a lot of maybes."

Sam ignored this. "Tell me about what the cops have."

One of Dean's conditions for taking this case had been that Sam was banned from impersonating police. Sam didn't mind; Dean was right, for one thing, and anyway it was good to keep in practice impersonating other random authority figures, fictional relatives, and trustworthy journeymen. It kept the mind limber. Practically equivalent to crossword puzzles, really.

Dean pried a wad of napkins out of the dispenser. "Freshest one, Lindsey Chase? She went for her lunch break at the nursing home where her agency had her and never came back. Coworkers said she usually ate in the neighborhood park, even in winter, so she could smoke. Police didn't find anything suspicious there, but it was two days before they checked. I went by and had a look at it; it's pretty much just a picnic bench and a glorified drainage bitch, but there's enough cover that somebody might have been able to snatch her without being seen. There's no sign any of the others ever set foot in the place, though, and your banker, Marquez, definitely didn't. A dude sold him flowers on the other side of town maybe fifteen minutes after his secretary saw him leave work. He was walking from his office to meet his wife for dinner and never showed."

"What about gyms? And this might sound weird, but did he do any boating?"

"Nah. Talked to Mrs. Marquez; sounds like he was strictly a landlubber. He wouldn't even go on a cruise with her. He did belong to a gym, but it was the one in their little gated community. None of the others went anywhere near there, and I don't think Lindsey Chase even knew what gyms are for."

A food runner slid their orders across the table, the smell of onions and chili rising up with the steam. Dean tucked a napkin into the collar of his Faux Fed couture.

"Three hot wieners, Dean?" Sam said. "Really think you can take that many?"

"Well breakfast was at fuck me o'clock, thanks to your overdeveloped work ethic, so, yeah." Dean took a bite and chewed with his mouth half open, a blissed-out look on his face. "How's your salad, Francis?"

"Green. How's that hot wiener?"

"Pretty damned good. Skipping the chili was a mistake, I'm telling you."

"I dunno. That one looks like a mouthful."

"Sammy, are you intimidated by my hot wiener?"

"It is pretty thick." A gob of chili splatted into the basket when Dean went to take a bite. "Not much good if it's just going to go off in your lap, though."

"You've got the wrong attitude for eating hot wieners, Sam. It's supposed to be a pleasurable experience. You gotta get your hands dirty."

"Hey, I'm not a prude. I've had my share hot wieners. Just because I won't eat _any_ hot wiener—"

"Ohh, I see how it is. You act all picky, but really you just want your hot wieners naked in your mouth."

Two glasses were slammed down onto the table between them, right next to their empties. The man from the register glared at them and stalked away.

Dean looked levelly at Sam while he chewed the last of his food. "Hot wieners are serious business."

Sam agreed with a tilt of an eyebrow. He wiped his (chili-free, thanks) fingers and stretched his legs under the table. "Alright. We should get moving. The police are probably done with Dorner's apartment by now, so I'm going to check it out. What about you?"

"I started looking at the next one back, Brendan Whatshisname, while I was wasting away from hunger waiting on your ass. The police file on him is pretty thin. Apparently he'd had some skirmishes with juvie, and the girlfriend had a record for fraud. They never looked too hard, basically. I got a hold of the sister, though; heading to her place next."

"Were the local detectives curious at all why you were asking for all these files?"

"Sure."

"And?"

Dean drained the last of his refill. "I told them the Bureau was considering whether they might be related."

"And?"

"They didn't actually laugh in my face, because FBI, but they did that face-twitch thing cops do when they really wish they could laugh in your face."

Sam couldn't entirely hide his disappointment. He'd been hoping, in some part of him, that if only they suggested it to the law enforcement who'd worked the cases in real time, someone there would realize that there really was some connection, some clue that had previously been discounted that he and Dean didn't have yet.

"Sam, maybe there just isn't anything here." Dean's voice was infuriatingly nonjudgmental. "There was a lead, we checked it out, it didn't pan. Not the first time, won't be the last. Unless the fuglies' Mother of All really does manage to gank us, anyway."

Except that this was different. Sam could feel it in every forcedly casual thing Dean said to him, every just-gonna-stroll-down-to-the-ice-machine-while-I-talk-to-Bobby,-no-big phone conversation Dean thought Sam didn't know was about him, and, most of all, every hunt Dean tried to get Sam to sit out, because apparently no one at all or even some stranger was better at your back than a time bomb.

But saying so would only make him sound—paranoid. Unbalanced. Admitting he'd been wrong about this one would erode Dean's trust in him incrementally; insisting that he wasn't would calve it off like a glacier.

He slid out of the booth and stood. "Well, we might as well finish up what we started. Don't keep the lady waiting."

Dean belched slightly and fished out the car keys. "Want me to drop you off?"

"Nah. It's only a few minutes from here. I could use the walk."

"'K. I'll let you know if Whitmore's sister gives me anything interesting."

They parted ways at the door. Sam could hear the Impala's engine turn over as he started off westward, then, a minute later, the rumble receding behind him.

He'd only gone three blocks when he saw it. Technically, he'd seen its steeple from a mile off, but Providence had so many steeples on offer that he hadn't paid any attention. There it was, though: the Church of Our Lady of the Angels.

Father Gregory's church.

In fairness, it made sense that Dean wouldn't remember the Providence case so well. They led colorful lives, and Father Gregory had never appeared to Dean. If he had—well. He'd remember. Sam had never heard of a spirit touching the living like that before or since, and that, in itself, was interesting. Maybe Father Gregory hadn't been an angel, but he'd been something they'd never suspected a spirit could be, either. And that was the thing: they didn't know all that spirits were capable of. No one did.

Spirits were human.

Sam slowed, then stopped. He found himself standing before the steps almost without realizing it. He looked, first, for the bloodstain Father Gregory had once left there; but it was long gone, of course. He raised his eyes to the facade.

The church looked different, seen like this. It had been winter when they'd come here last, cold and wet and gray, and the stones of the church and the clouds in the sky had all seemed like more of the same. Now, the neighborhood was just as down-at-heel as it had been, but the church jutted up into a clear spring sky, every block, arch, and ornament etched in clean, slanting sunlight. It was even possible to make out the leaded pattern of the principal stained glass window: Mary, at the center of a perfect circle of angels ranged like spokes in a wheel.

"You!"

Sam twisted. An ashen-faced priest was staring at him from the sidewalk in shock. He took a step towards Sam.

"It is you, isn't it? What are you doing here?" Father Reynolds demanded. There was no anger or fear in his face, at least not yet; he was too shaken for that.

Sam opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Father Reynolds came up to him, studying him. He had not aged well.

"Well," the priest said eventually. "Come in, then." He turned and began to climb the steps.

Father Reynolds moved with difficulty, like he'd aged ten years instead of three (four). His back was thin and bent under his robe. Harmless; defenseless. The urge to grab his skull by his hair and drive his face into the steps until it was obliterated rolled up in Sam with such sudden intensity that for a split second, he saw it happening as plainly as a movie. Hate and blood and bone and slamming _againagainagain—_

Sam fled.

* * *

The apartment complex Jacob Dorner lived in had been something industrial before it had been gutted and recast in a fashion designer's image of industry. It wasn't the only one; similar gentrified buildings studded the street, obtrusive among the working class homes that predated them.

Breaking in was simple enough. Dorner's salary was good but not lavish, and the car registered to his name was a three-year-old Ford Focus. He was not a man who lived above his means. Sure enough, there was no doorman, and the security system was a mass-produced cakewalk. All the tenants here were younger professional types and it was still the middle of the workday, so as soon as he'd cased the building to be sure the police presence had departed, Sam had the run of the place.

There was no crime scene tape. There was no crime scene, technically. Sam eased the front door shut behind him and glanced the place over. Subdued paint colors, exposed brick, accordion blinds, Ikea couch, Xbox. Black-and-white, contemporary photographs in minimalist frames on the walls; family portraits matted as formally as the art photos; bicycle leaned against the back of the couch; Nat Geo on the little shelf under the coffee table; trophy oar in a bracket over the entertainment center. Tasteful. Bland.

One corner looked a bit more lived-in—an armchair next to an overflowing bookshelf—so he focused on that. Trade journals on the top shelf, neatly labeled business records on the bottom, a combination of classic fiction and old textbooks sticky-noted for reference in the middle—and one framed photograph of a boy and a girl holding a racing shell over their heads. Sam recognized Jacob's sister from her obituary photo.

He moved on to the kitchen. It was separated from the living room by a breakfast bar (tasteful, bland) and equipped with an energy-efficient refrigerator (tasteful, bland) filled mostly with prepackaged health foods (tasteful, bland). A strip of paper on the refrigerator door had a series of numbers scrawled on it; Sam got briefly excited, but then realized they were most likely only jogging times. A battered Brown U mug sat inverted next to the espresso machine.

Why wasn't he close with any of his old classmates?

The breakfast bar had seating for four with more stools stacked in the closet, so evidently Dorner did entertain. Sam leaned against it for a second and frowned. It was vibrating. When he opened the cabinet doors set into the base of the bar, he found a freezer that took up about half of it. It seemed odd; Dorner's fridge was pretty small, but it still wasn't full. All the freezer revealed was a few bags of frozen veggies, though.

Sam passed into the bedroom via the bathroom (clean fixtures, folded towels, _Calvin and Hobbes_ on the back of the toilet). The bedroom was the aesthetic twin of the living room, just with less light and more clutter. Closet full of business casual and fashionable workout clothes; file cabinet of tax returns and the like; weights and sporting gear and guy's-guy tools on a rack in the corner; trendy rug; queen bed. The Kindle on the nightstand was loaded with contemporary fiction and books about naval history. There was lotion in the nightstand, but no porn anywhere. Sam began to suspect that Dorner was the kind of guy who stored most of his life on his laptop. And although there was a laptop tote, the computer itself was missing. Police must have taken it. Expected, but frustrating as hell.

He stood in the middle of the room and expelled his breath. There was another of those black-and-white architectural shots in here—but none of anybody else. All evidence of Jacob's family was out in the living room. Sam took a closer look at the photograph. At first he'd thought these were commercial prints, but he was surprised to realize that not only were they signed, but that the tiny signature penciled in the corner was _J Dorner_. Apparently Jacob fancied himself something of a photographer. They were all architectural subjects: viaducts, arty close-ups of iron girders, abandoned buildings, crumbling graffiti, weird angles of bridge cables. The sort of romanticization of squalor common to people who didn't spend a lot of time living in it.

And the really surprising thing was that this evidence of a hobby was the first surprising thing in here. Practically every other feature of this apartment Sam could have extrapolated from what he already knew of the man on paper. It was all entirely expected, unless you counted the oversized freezer, and, hell, that probably came from the previous tenant.

Nevertheless, he snapped on latex gloves and went deeper. 

An hour later, he left in defeat. If Jacob Dorner had ever had a brush with anything more unnatural than over-the-counter tooth-whitener, Sam couldn't find the traces of it. Maybe he really was cracking up.

Or maybe he was just losing his instincts and his edge.

He paused in the apartment building's vestibule to case the street for police, then let himself out. A school bus was letting off children on the corner. Sam let himself get a block away from Dorner's building before he pulled out his phone. If he remembered the map correctly, there was a park just a few blocks away; if he cut through it, he'd come out practically on top of the bus line he needed to get back to the motel, and as a bonus, Jacob had probably jogged there regularly. Maybe he'd luck out into a clue or a witness.

Maybe Dean would buy him a puppy and trade the Impala in for a Volvo.

The afternoon light was slanting and golden. Sam mentally outlined how the rest of the evening would go: he'd meet up with Dean, they'd spend a pointless hour or two sorting through any files he'd liberated from the Providence PD, hit up a drive-through, and leave. It was over.

Dean picked up on the second ring. "Hey."

"Hey." Sam entered the park; it was one of those densely wooded city lots that made the most of the space with winding paths and unchecked undergrowth. "You got anything?"

"Brendan Whitmore was not what you'd call an overachiever. His sister's cute, though. You?"

"Bupkis." It was almost a relief to admit it. "I think I might be able to get somewhere if I had Jacob's laptop or his camera, but I'm pretty sure the police took them. His running shoes were gone, so it's unlikely he had them on him."

That was Dean's opening to offer to do some fraudulent evidence seizure, but unsurprisingly, he didn't take it. "Tough break."

"Yeah." It had been worth a try. "Anyway, I'm headed back. Meet you at the motel?"

There was a pause on the line. Then: "I already checked us out. Since I didn't know if we'd be splitting tonight. I mean. No point throwing dragon gold at an empty room, right?" Another pause, shorter but more awkward. "Rendezvous at the hash house just down the street from it, instead?"

Sam's face burned with humiliation. "Right, yeah, of course." He really should have anticipated that. "See you there in thirty."

He hung up.

He hadn't really been paying attention to the route he was taking for the past sixty seconds. The path had forked, and he'd just let his feet carry him wherever was basically the correct direction on autopilot. Sunlight filtered through spring-green leaves and dappled the asphalt walkway, and the air was just beginning to cool. He was at the bottom of a little hollow. Children's voices came in on the breeze from a playground somewhere, but this place was solitary.

A girl on a trick bike came hurtling around a corner and down the slope, moving so fast and with such total teenaged obliviousness to the possibility that anyone else could be in the way that if Sam hadn't been trained to stay alive (mostly) by dodging fast-moving things with claws, he'd probably have been mown down. As it was, he jumped off the path with a yelp and into squelching mud. She was gone as quickly as she came, momentum carrying her up the opposite side of the hollow and out of sight.

"I don't suppose you've seen a man called Jacob Dorner!" Sam shouted after her.

He lifted his shoe and grimaced. Wading a little farther into the brush to scrape the mud off on a rock, he looked up at the sunlight slanting through the trees.

And saw.

For a second, he wasn't sure. But as he picked his way through the ferns and litter and slightly oily puddles, he found the correct angle and then he knew. He didn't know what it meant, but he knew it had to be the key. All around it, the vegetation was yellowed and curling black at the edges.

When the cold came down and he watched the new leaf in front of him freeze through, he knew why that was, too.

His last thought wasn't about his brother. It was something to do with the hours at the local laundromat.


	4. out of your depth and out of your mind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean Winchester and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

There were certain advantages to blowing into a town and a witness pool with a whole new angle the cops hadn't worked, yet. People were more patient under questioning when they thought that maybe, this time, _these_ officers were different. You were more likely to get through the door in the first place and, once you did, the information you got tended to be less rote. They were more likely to call you if they saw something later on. They were less likely to question your parentage.

The downside was the hope in people's eyes when they thought that the authorities were actually getting somewhere.

"So you— The FBI thinks Brendan's case could be connected to those other people's? You have a lead?"

Dean cleared his throat. "I really can't disclose too many details, ma'am. All I can tell you is that we're taking a fresh look and we can't rule anything out."

Brendan Whitmore's little sister was one of those girls with a moon-face on a slender frame. Not exactly pretty, but cute. Yeah, cute was the word: soft brown hair, tiny frame, big blue eyes. She _looked_ like somebody's little sister. What Dean couldn't figure out was why, being Brendan's, she particularly cared what had happened to him. Brendan had moved out at eighteen after an upbringing that didn't seem to drip love on either side. The police file indicated that he hadn't called home of his own volition in months when he disappeared, and his parents, when interviewed, hadn't been sure exactly where he lived or worked. One of his two juvie convictions was for pawning his mother's and aunt's jewelry to buy a gaming platform.

Still, maybe there was more to the portrait. Somebody could be a piece of work in every other way and still look out for their kid sibling. Dean ought to know.

Jenna Whitmore gestured him to a seat in her parents' living room, sitting on the edge of the recliner opposite. She'd already apologized for her parents' absence twice. "Can I get you any coffee, Agent, or…?"

"No thanks, I'm good. How would you describe your relationship with Brendan? Were you close?"

She tucked a stray strand of her ponytail behind her ear before she answered. "Well, no. Not really, no."

"Closer than his relationship with your parents, then? Because you're the one who's been calling the police station every week. Actually, file says you made the initial call."

"Well, he's still my _brother_ ," Jenna said. Dean nodded to that.

"I don't know," she went on after a minute. "I don't think Brendan's really that close with anyone, you know? I mean, I guess he was close with his girlfriend, but I never met her, so I couldn't tell you a lot about them. He had some friends in school, guys who liked the same video games that he did. But he's always been kind of a loner. He was doing okay, though. Steady. He'd been at the hotel for four years and he never got in trouble after the thing when he was sixteen."

Defensiveness was creeping into her tone. Did Brendan Whitmore need a lot of defending? "So he was working his way up the ladder in the hotel business?"

"Yeah! Sort of. I mean, he kept the same job, but he got raises. Well. A raise. He wanted to get his management certificate, but he had to save up, first."

Brendan Whitmore had not had a savings account, and his checking account averaged about $400 every statement cycle. Dean let that topic go. "So, you guys hang out at all? Since he left home?"

"Well. No."

"How often did you talk?"

"Every week. Most weeks."

"On the phone? What'd you talk about?"

"Not about anything, really; I called him every week to, you know, check in, invite him to family stuff."

"Your parents invite him to family stuff, too?"

Her cheeks pinkened. "They knew I would do it."

"He ever call you?"

"No."

"He always pick up?"

"…No."

Dean was getting the idea that those calls weren't very long even when Brendan did. He glanced over the walls. Framed family photos; wedding picture of the oldest brother, the one in Wisconsin; shots of Jenna's high school graduation, varsity basketball championships games, and marching band performances with her playing a tuba bigger than she was. One of Brendan, flanked by older relatives at some sort of churchy looking function in a suit and a school-shooter stare. "He used to come to your games and stuff, I guess? Your graduation and stuff like that?"

Definitely blushing, now. "No."

"What about your older brother?" Dean flipped through his steno pad. "Um… James. Was he close with Brendan before he moved out of state?"

"Oh, Jimmy's our half-brother. He's more like an uncle, really; he's almost ten years older than Brendan, so we never had all that much in common, you know? He's a nice guy, though."

Dean felt like he had to be missing something. There was Jenna, here, and she seemed nice and well adjusted. Living at home while she got her nursing degree at community college. Sweet. Devoted to her family. Normal. But she seemed to be the only one under this roof who felt that basic familial attachment. Yeah, Brendan sounded like a slacker and a sleaze bag, but it seemed to count for nothing with anyone other than Jenna that he was blood.

If he was just that unlovable, why was his sister still calling the police station on the regular? Who was weird, here: Brendan, Jenna, or their parents?

"Your parents don't seem too concerned about Brendan going missing."

"They are! I mean, of course they are. They worry about him. But they figure he just went somewhere else."

Dean fixed her with a level stare. "Went somewhere else."

"Yeah."

If Brendan had gone somewhere else, he'd done it without bothering to close his scanty bank account. Then again, maybe he'd never given up his habit of pawning other people's belongings, after all. Dean made a mental note to check into any reports of stolen property at the hotel where Brendan worked. "So why don't you buy that?"

She hesitated. Dean tried to give her a "I'm a handsome, dashing lawman and you know you want to make me happy" smile of encouragement and mentally kicked himself. He needed Sam for this. Sam would give her that revoltingly earnest look and she'd find herself so busy spilling her innermost thoughts and feelings that she'd never stop to realize that no real fed was that sincere.

"I don't know. I just…. He's ignored my calls before, okay, yeah, but never for weeks. Never for months. I'm scared something happened to him."

"Can you think of anyone who'd want to hurt him? Was he into anything where he'd know people like that?"

"No! Nothing like that. It just… doesn't feel right."

With that, at least, Dean was in perfect agreement.

"Well," he said, standing and tucking his notebook away in a blazer pocket, "if we find anything, we'll let you know. But honestly? I think your parents are probably right. Brendan probably just started over somewhere."

She looked at once crestfallen and like she'd sort of like to believe him. He almost felt bad for stomping on her hopes—not only for answers, but for proof that her brother gave a shit about his family enough to drop them a line before dropping off the planet. It was the best thing for her, though. He handed over a card. "If you think of anything, call me."

Seconds later, he was descending the external wooden stairs that connected the Whitmores' apartment to the street. With a little luck, his visit would be just underwhelming enough that it never crossed her mind to mention it to the police.

Not that they'd be here long enough for it to matter.

He felt a twinge of guilt, walking to the car. The odds that something really was going on here were decent, and to leave without answers went against the grain. Especially after meeting Jenna. But her brother was probably dead, and Dean's wasn't.

He intended to keep it that way.

Anyway, this town gave him the fucking heebs, and that had nothing to do with Sam, or with Sam's wall, or with the hundred and one million actually unspeakable things that could happen to Sam if a screw got jostled two millimeters in the wrong direction inside Sam's head. It had nothing to do with the triggers that they knew lay fifteen miles away, along with corpses that a very real part of Sam that Dean didn't know what to do with had made without remorse, or with the countless triggers they didn't know about yet that lay everywhere else. It had nothing to do with the suspicion that was wrapping itself slowly around Dean's spine that even the slaughter in Bristol, even trying to kill Bobby, even letting Dean get turned by a vamp might all be cupcakes at a kindergarten Christmas party compared to the parts of Sam's missing year that they didn't know about, and the still worse suspicion that no matter what Dean said, Sam would never really stop until he'd dug up all of it. Because that was what Sam did, after all. He might tell you he'd leave something along; he might even think that he meant it. But all the while, he'd be digging, like one of those mechanical moles boring sideways in the darkness and the earth.

It had nothing to do with Dean not knowing which he was really afraid of: that finding those things out would break him as thoroughly as it would Sam, or that he wouldn't even care.

His phone rang. Speak of the devil.

He really needed to rethink that saying around Sam.

He held the phone to his ear as he fished the keys from his pocket. "Hey."

"Hey." There was no excitement in Sam's voice to suggest he'd found anything interesting. Good. "You got anything?"

Dean let himself into the Impala. It was just starting to get warm enough to make the car stuffy. "Brendan Whitmore was not what you'd call an overachiever. His sister's cute, though. You?"

"Bupkis." Dean relaxed the death grip on the phone he hadn't even realized he had. "I think I might be able to get somewhere if I had Jacob's laptop or his camera, but I'm pretty sure the police took them."

Then Sam went on to outline why he didn't think they'd been on Dorner when he disappeared, and, wow, was he really expecting Dean to break that shit out of evidence just to encourage him? "Tough break," Dean said, unsympathetically.

"Yeah." Disappointment, poorly hidden. "Anyway, I'm headed back; meet you at the motel?"

Dean paused. Well. This was awkward.

"I already checked us out, since I didn't know if we'd be splitting tonight. I mean, no point throwing dragon gold at an empty room, right?" Hey, someone had to look out for their finances. Really, what had Sam expected? Dean cleared his throat. "Rendezvous at the hash house down the street from it, instead?"

There was a moment before Sam replied. "Right, yeah, of course." Fuck. _Fuck_. "See you there in thirty."

Dean would maybe have said something conciliatory, but Sam had already hung up. Fucking great. Definitely time for Dean to distract himself a bit from one problem with another. He punched up speed dial two and waited for Bobby's answering machine to pick up.

It did, but not with the message Dean had expected.

_"This is Robert Singer. I'm on a business trip and not currently reachable. If this is an emergency, hang up and call 9-1-1. Is this is the other kind of emergency, hang up and call someone else."_

After a split second of what sounded like car keys, the recording cut out and bleeped.

"What the hell, Bobby." Dean stared sightlessly at the dash. "Are you kidding me right now?"

His mind blanked. Obviously, Bobby had taken off on a hunt, but this? Tearing off without giving a single ally a word as to what you were after or where you were headed, leaving your family to find out by your damned _voice mail_ that you'd gone at all? This was not how you took off on a hunt.

But it was, Dean had a bad feeling, exactly how you took off on some sort of guilt-driven suicide mission.

Bobby's answering machine was still recording. "I cannot even believe you right now." Dean's voice shook with anger. "You want to go off the deep end over Rufus, fine, but save it for after we shitcan the big boss. You've got twenty-four hours to call one of us before we hunt you d—"

The machine cut him off. He swore.

He tried Bobby's two active cells and got sent straight to uncustomized voice mail on one and a disconnected number on the other. He shoved down the the impulse to smash the phone against the steering wheel, barely. Fury made his hands tremble as he turned the key in the ignition harder than Baby deserved.

It was fine. It was fine. Their next stop was Bobby's house, anyway, and the cantankerous alcoholic bastard had probably left information for them there. And it wasn't like Bobby was some dewy-eyed first-timer; he might be trying to get himself killed with this shit, but he probably wouldn't succeed.

And it would make Sam leave this place without an argument.

He pulled away from the curb, a muscle jumping in his cheek. "This is not good," he told the passenger who wasn't there.

* * *

An hour later, Dean was getting itchy. So was the waitress, if the black look when she topped up his coffee was anything to go by. He left the cup untouched and dialed Sam again.

"Dude, you miss your bus or something? Call me back."

Second message.

Dean hit the head, came back, and texted _Hurry your ass up, I want food_ to Sam even though he wasn't hungry. No pissy reply came.

Ten minutes later, Dean ordered a burger to keep the waitress at bay. Then he called Sam again, left another message, stared at the salt shaker for a minute, tossed a bill down on the table, and moved out.

It was only a few minutes to Jacob Dorner's apartment if you weren't relying on public transportation. No Sam in sight. Dean let himself into unit 212 and spent exactly enough time inside to verify that it was empty. Then he started knocking on doors and asking after sightings of someone seven feet tall with too much hair.

Back outside on the street. There was a coffee place a block and a half down that looked just froufrou enough that Sam might have stopped in. The baristas didn't recognize the description or the picture on Dean's phone. Neither did any of the passersby he stopped.

Dean stood in the middle of the street, heart pounding, mouth dry, looking for anything that might have arrested Sam's attention. Where he might have gone.

_No. No._

He jogged down to a gas station several blocks north of Dorner's apartment to ask where to pick up the nearest bus that ran to the part of town where they'd been staying. There was a park between him and it. Had to be that. And people noticed things in parks. They hung around and played ball and watched their fellow man. It was what parks were for.

No one had noticed Sam.

The sun was setting; the park was emptying out, and by the time Dean penetrated through to the other side and the bus stop there, it was too dark for him to be able to see a size fourteen print in a bramble-screened patch of mud in the park's most densely wooded hollow.

* * *

Dean ripped the page he wanted out of a borrowed Yellow Pages and left the convenience store without a backwards glance at the clerk's protests.

He smoothed the paper out on the Impala's steering wheel. The first unique entry under _Lodging_ was America's Pride Inn. More corporate than their usual, but at least it was cheap. Once after a museum heist had gone tits up, Dean had ended up having to check into a place called the Amalise that charged four hundred a night. And Sam had informed him that the cops weren't far behind by the time he got there, so Dean never even got to use the jacuzzi.

_Do you have a Mr. Rockford checked in already? No? Guess I must have beat my brother here. Yeah, I'll take a double. Length of stay? Not sure. Cash deposit work?_

Sam was fine. Sam had missed his bus and then dropped his phone in a mud puddle and then not been able to call Dean in the three intervening hours because Sam had stupid hair and no charisma and every girl whose phone he'd asked to borrow had fled in the opposite direction. Sam would have taken a cab, no doubt, but he had probably bent over wrong and dropped his wallet into an active cement pour. It would take him longer on foot, but any minute now, having followed the same protocol as Dean, he'd walk through that door.

His mind still did this to him every time, was the worst thing.

Dean bit off lengths of duct tape. Over the dresser, he taped the map of Providence he'd bought twenty minutes before. Over the mirror, he taped the details of the bus routes. On the bedside table, he set up the police scanner.

Sam had gotten himself arrested. Some member of the finest had recognized him from a regional bulletin and hauled him in without a struggle, because Sam's hero was Mahatma goddamned Gandhi. That was fine, though, because Sam would name-drop Dean's working FBI alias, and after dicking about for a few hours they'd call him, and it wouldn't even make their top twenty for improbable escapes, and Sam wouldn't have another seizure during all this, because he hadn't pissed off any giant spiders in this town (that they knew of). And if name-dropping Dean didn't work or Sam hadn't wanted to risk it, no worries, because Dean would hear something on the scanner.

The scanner coughed intermittently with traffic incidents and convenience store robberies.

Dean called Bobby's functioning cell number again. Voice mail. He hung up.

None of the hospitals had admitted anyone matching Sam's description since he had last checked an hour ago. He hung up when the receptionist at Providence General offered to transfer him to the morgue.

Sam had called him at 4:47 p.m. Dean's first call to him had gone unanswered at 5:39. Assuming Sam had gotten on the bus, there were three termini he could potentially have reached in that time. Assuming he had not, it was possible to establish a maximum radius of approximately 3.5 miles from Jacob Dorner's apartment within which Sam could have walked. With string and a ruler, Dean marked the 38.5 square mile circle on the map and started marking off the streets he'd already searched.

Sam was holed up in a bar somewhere, shitfaced but otherwise fine. Sam had ducked into a library and turned off his phone and lost track of time. Dean called Bobby again.

None of the bus drivers driving the three routes that stopped near Jacob Dorner's apartment recognized Sam's photo. No one to whom Dean showed it at any of the stops along the way did, either, but it was nearly ten o'clock and the crowds were thinning.

Bobby's voice mail twice more.

Sam had finally had enough. Sam had reached his breaking point with scratched Metallica cassettes and brotherly body odor and unbrotherly desperation and a four-door sedan where he couldn't escape any of it. Sam was finally, thoroughly disgusted. Sam had left. Sam wasn't _missing._

Dean worked outward in a spiral from the last location he'd checked near Dorner's apartment. It wasn't feasible to search thirty-eight square miles on foot, of course, but Sam's probable on-foot radius was much smaller than his possible one. Under a mile, given the traffic and tangle of side streets. If something had happened in those few square miles, there would be some sign of it in one of these alleys, dumpsters, parks, rail yards, cemeteries, or underpasses. He couldn't have just vanished. Not like the others.

By sunrise, Dean had worked as far east as the weiner shop where they'd eaten the day before and nearly as far west. At least two people had apparently called the cops to report a strange man trespassing. As he walked back to where he'd left the car, he kept searching. There was the barest glimmer of an unseasonable frost melting on the Impala's hood in the morning sun.

This time, when he got Bobby's voice mail yet again, he left a message.

"Sam's missing. _Call me."_

* * *

Traffic was just starting to drown out birdsong by the time Dean let himself back into the room. Sounds, light, smells all felt flattened in that particular way they only did in the morning after an all-nighter. Automatically, his mind worked through the nearby options for caffeine.

He sat on the end of the bed nearest the door and stared at the one opposite. Neatly made. As he watched, the alarm clock flipped over from 7:16 to 7:17.

"Cas."

Just as he had every other time he'd ever tried this in an empty room, he felt like an idiot as soon as the sound left his mouth. It also produced no results.

"I, uh. I know you're busy." Distantly, he also knew that he only placed these calls when he wanted something, and that possibly, parked up there on whatever cloud had the best strategic lookout, Castiel might reasonably be growing irritated by that. But that didn't matter, couldn't matter, because this was _Sam_ , and it always was Sam, and Cas had to see that that was reason enough in itself for everything. "Don't want to yank you out of a good bar brawl, or anything, but if you've got a minute, America's Pride Inn, Providence, room 117. It's Sam. Please."

Silence was the only answer. Dean stared at the alarm clock and felt nothing.

No. He didn't have time to be numb. Sam didn't have time for him to be numb. He needed to pull himself together and move—

He surged to his feet and grabbed Sam's duffel.

Living on the road, there were few higher crimes than violating what privacy they had left. The last time Dean had looked in Sam's duffel without his express permission had been five months ago, when Sam was not Sam ( _but he was_ ), a week before a legit goddess had told him that his unbrother was inhuman, and Dean had feared the worst, hadn't been able to stop the pictures of the devil wearing his brother like a too-new suit and had had no choice. Even then, he'd felt guilty. Before that, it had been in the run up to Sam's sacrifice, and Dean hadn't even tried to hide it from Sam, had done it regularly just to make sure Sam wasn't doing anything stupid, hadn't relapsed, wasn't in bed with the enemy again, didn't think he could could make a fool of Dean again. At the time, he'd told himself he didn't feel a shred of guilt about it, but every day since then, the feeling had been growing on him that maybe, actually, he had. Before that, 2007, and Sam had vanished and it was as bad as Dad, maybe worse, and afterwards Dean saw the exact moment when Sam realized that Dean had been in his duffel and it shouldn't have mattered, to either of them, after a demon had been in Sam for over a week, but it had. In a year with Lisa, Dean had never been able to bring himself to open the thing.

He'd feel guilty about this later.

He pulled out Sam's notes, Sam's weapons, Sam's beat-up paperbacks and carefully sequestered dirty laundry and toiletry kit and a tiny, cheap little mp3 player that Dean hadn't even known that Sam _had_ , when did he even listen to it? He cleared the sharps and explosives, had a quick grope for anything obviously breakable, and upended the whole thing and dumped the contents on the floor.

He'd already tried the brute force approach. He'd already tried Bobby. Hell, he'd already tried _prayer_. The only way back to his brother was through the facts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this chapter is really more of an interlude. More action coming in the next!


	5. with your fear flowing out behind you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Of course, it was possible that Sam hadn't said anything about the book because he hadn't thought anything of it. It was possible he'd just been cleaning up, same as with the rest of the junk they'd cleared out of Rufus's place. It was possible he'd meant merely to destroy it or return it to Bobby, not to keep it in his back pocket in case he ever felt like doing something stupid.
> 
> It wasn't very fucking likely, but it was possible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter is long. I hope it will prove worth the wait.

.

 

 

Water woke Sam.

It splashed on his cheek, annoying like a fly. He was lying on something hard. Fucking squatting again. Sometimes he thought dad did it on purpose, some sort of Spartan warrior crap. Like in the _Republic_ , the training of the guardians of the city. Silver souls. Austerity. But with more Funyuns and shittier plumbing.

_Drip_.

Irritated, he rubbed at his cheek. Wet. It hurt to move. Concrete grit burned along a scratch or something on his elbow, and finally the gears meshed to shift him into full consciousness.

Sam opened his eyes.

Not squatting. No dad. No Dean.

Either he was adapting, or the light had grown stronger, or both. The room was visible in outline now, just enough to give him a sense of the size of the chamber and show its main features. He lay on a concrete platform that extended perhaps fifteen feet from the wall against which he lay before dropping off into void. Blackness notched into it over on his left: the stairwell he'd fallen into earlier.

The main platform ran for maybe thirty feet altogether, terminating on his right in the brick wall he'd found by touch before. Beyond the platform, the opposite wall curved down into darkness. He could just make out pipes emitting from it: big enough to let rats in, but not big enough to let anything human out. Not in one piece, anyway.

In the corner to his left, on the other hand, man-sized apertures were set into either wall, a few feet away from each other. He'd—yes. He'd heard the others' voices coming from there. He'd been trying to crawl towards them when he'd passed out.

The opening set into the wall perpendicular to the platform was fitted with a heavy iron grate; the one set into the wall at his back was not. Stains showed around their edges, but they seemed dry now. At least, they seemed as dry as anything in here did, which was not very.

Sam took all of this in before he sat up. Everything ached in the way that only several hours on a damp concrete floor could produce, but apart from that, he felt… okay. Dehydration headache, sore muscles, stiff joints—he could deal with those. It seemed that the way he'd felt before had been something affecting him, not something _wrong_ with him. Like the ghost's first contact had flash-frozen his senses, leaving him to a slow, painful thaw. Now he could function. Provided, of course, that he could figure out what the hell he was going to do.

His stomach growled audibly. He'd better figure it out quickly.

Someone was crying somewhere. They were quiet about it, sniffles and low, choked-down little moans, plainly trying not to be heard. It didn't sound like Marian; Sam doubted it was Lindsey. He climbed to his feet and padded over to the corner. The sound came from the grated opening; the other Sam approached slowly, breathing the way they'd been trained to do, senses open instead of muscles tensed—but when he finally drew level with the open pipe, nothing happened. Nothing emitted from it. He could see that it slanted up into the wall, but nothing more. It was a black pit. He'd fit through it, easily, but he knew getting out of here was not going to be that simple.

And if getting out wasn't simple, the ghost was unlikely to make it simple for Dean to come in.

First things first. "Jacob?" Sam called softly. The sounds cut off. "Jacob?" he pressed.

"Fuck off."

A usual reaction from a man caught crying, but not one Sam had time for. "What happened?"

"I said, _fuck off._ "

"I heard you. Now tell me what you saw."

"I— Screw you. Screw you." Dorner was not doing well at controlling his hysteria. "You don't know _anything._ "

"Jacob, focus. Talk to me. I need information to get us out of here."

"Go to hell! We've been down here forever, and what the hell have you done? _Rescue?_ Is that supposed to be a joke? You didn't do shit. You can't do shit. You can't—"

"Pull yourself together," Sam snapped. "Like it or not, we're stuck down here, and even if you think I'm lying about the rest, I'm your best chance of getting out of here because I'm the freshest physically and I've got someone looking for me. Now stop sniveling and _tell me what you saw._ "

He hoped that was abusive enough to remind Dorner favorably of his old rowing coach.

When Dorner finally did answer, his voice was lower, sullen. Fine; sullen beat hysterical. "I don't know what I saw. It— I thought there was someone in here with me, but it wasn't— I didn't get a good look at it. It just got so cold. Fuck." It had, yes. Sam remembered. Thank God the chill had lifted, else none of them would last very long. "I thought I saw— But I was wrong. Whatever. None of that matters. It thought whoever it was went away, but then something just…"

Sam thought back to what Lindsey had said. "Laid down in you?"

Jacob's laugh sounded like gravel shaken in a box. "That's a very Biblical way to put it."

Without quite knowing why, Sam colored. "I didn't mean _that_. That was how Lindsey described it."

"Yeah? I'd describe it like getting an ice water enema up in places you never wanted to think about."

Sam crouched and peered up into the slanting shaft, the ungrated one, but he couldn't see anything. If anything lay at the end of it—freedom, concrete, the ghost—he was going to have to crawl in to find out what. "What happened next?"

"Nothing happened next. I was dreaming, or tripping, or something. Can you get hallucinations from hunger?"

"Only much farther along than we are," Sam said absently, tracing the inside rim of the pipe with his hands. "What'd you dream about?"

"What does it matter?"

"Humor me."

Dorner clearly wanted to talk, was the thing, and Sam would gladly let him vent as much panic as he wanted to if he got some information out of it. "It was stupid, okay? I dreamt I was looking for someone. Only I wasn't really, it was like someone else was. But they were, I don't know, _borrowing_ me to do it, or something, and I was walking back along all these routes I go jogging, and—"

He cut off. Sam tilted his head. "Jacob?"

"It doesn't matter." The tone was suddenly curt. "It didn't make any sense. It was just memories, but all screwed up. Normal fucking dream. You know? The thing you have when you're asleep?" His voice rose with every word.

"Jacob, I don't think it was a dream—"

"You don't think it was a dream? Oh, well that's helpful, I can see you're real fucking knowledgeable, and that's why we're all free instead of stuck down here." Sam raised his eyebrows. Some of the hysteria was creeping back into Dorner's voice, but it was more than that—anger, defensiveness. "Oh. Wait. We fucking _are_ stuck down here, starving to death in a goddamned sewer. You think you're here to fucking save us? Fuck you, you fucking—"

"Yeah, got that part," Sam muttered.

He wouldn't be getting anything more out of Jacob for a while. He considered the black of the open pipe before him. The odds that there was something waiting to rip him to shreds at the end of it were considerably better than the odds that it led to freedom, but he wouldn't know until he tried. No time like the present, he supposed.

Jacob was still cursing him out. "Back in a minute," Sam said.

* * *

There were three interesting things in Sam's duffel.

The first was the mp3 player, mainly because Dean had had no idea that Sam owned it. He wondered how old it was. He wondered when Sam listened to it. He'd have to find out so he could give him shit about it when he got him back.

The second was Sam's journal. Dean had known about this; hell, Dean had one like it. It wasn't a deeply personal object, or anything. They sometimes wrote in each other's and consulted them both freely. _Journal_ was a bit of a misnomer, really—it was just a place to jot down info they used a lot, to save the time of looking it up over and over. Or, occasionally, info that they expected to use a lot, because it was so useful, but ultimately didn't because it turned out there were catches.

Catches in their line of work tended to be substantial.

The third was chiefly interesting because Sam had no fucking business having it.

A case could be made that swiping it in the first place took real chutzpah on Sam's part, but the thing that ratcheted Dean's blood pressure up a notch every time he looked at it was that he hadn't known about this, either. Sam had picked it up and never said a damned thing.

Of course, it was possible that Sam hadn't said anything because he hadn't thought anything of it. It was possible he'd just been cleaning up, same as with the rest of the junk they'd cleared out of Rufus's place. It was possible he'd meant merely to destroy it or return it to Bobby, not to keep it in his back pocket in case he ever felt like doing something stupid.

It wasn't very fucking likely, but it was possible.

It was Rufus's address book. By most metrics, that made it about the least dangerous thing they'd taken out of that house, and the Impala was pretty well stuffed with his shit right now. Rufus had a daughter, living, but not nearby. All Bobby had been able to tell them about her was that she wasn't in the life and didn't need to run across anything that could change that, when or if she ever made it back from parts unknown to see to her father's estate. So basically, Dean and Sam had tried to be respectful, and all, but sifting through his stuff had pretty much been the greatest shopping spree of all time. Rufus hadn't liked them much, but Dean figured he'd probably disliked them marginally less than most people, and so he hadn't felt bad about adopting his supply of silver bullets. Probably even Sam hadn't angsted too much about the Damascus steel dagger he'd found with runes on the bare tang that Dean was pretty sure wasn't a reproduction.

Who was he kidding? Of course Sam had angsted about it. It was exactly the sort of thing he would angst about. But about this— _this_ he wouldn't. This he'd keep not secret, because that would imply guilty feeling, but private, so close to his chest Dean would never even know to worry.

And Dean knew that Sam knew better. This thing didn't shoot, burn, cut, or explode. It did things far less predictable. Bobby had warned them: be real goddamned careful about hooking up with any of Rufus Turner's associates.

But.

The thing was, he needed another set of eyes on this. That couldn't have been clearer, and Bobby was—God knew where. Cas wasn't answering. That concluded the list of people Dean even halfway trusted, but maybe Rufus had known someone who could be worth talking to, like a psychic, or—the thought had the book open on Dean's knees before he knew it—someone who'd be able to get a hold of Bobby.

It wasn't all hunters. Rufus had kept everything in here from plumbers to munitions suppliers. Some names Dean recognized; there were even lines for Bobby and for them. There was an old, old entry for their father, crossed out neatly in fountain pen. There were a lot of entries crossed out like that. Dean smiled grimly to see _Roy Kittle_ and _Walt Hannon_ among them.

The smile slid off of his face.

This was exactly why he wasn't supposed to be fucking looking at this shit. Unlike Bobby's, Rufus's contact list did not come conveniently filtered by moral fiber. Gordon Walker was in here, neatly and dispassionately crossed out in blue ink, and the thought of letting on to someone who might turn out to be cast in Gordon's mold that his brother was missing made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

He shut the book. Sam didn't have time for bullshit, and the unknowns in those pages would be inviting nothing but bullshit.

His gaze fell on Sam's journal, lying unassuming on the bedspread. It wasn't like it could hurt anything to check the ingredients list—

Dean stood and tossed the book back in the duffel. There was only one ingredient for that spell that mattered, and he wasn't going to go out and get it. That would be all they needed. He went back to the spread of information on the wall, ate another No-Doz, and stared at the sum of what he knew.

It was 9:07 in the morning, and Sam had been MIA for sixteen hours and fifty-two minutes.

"What disappears people all over town, at all times of the day, without any signs of a struggle, without any witnesses, without any tracks, without any blood, without any bodies ever turning up?" The empty bed behind him didn't answer. "Sounds like the start of a bad joke," he muttered.

Phantom attackers took people from their beds. Black dogs left bodies (and how). Banshees worked their way through families, and anyway they didn't disappear anyone. A cursed object couldn't possibly have made the rounds of all of the victims, and it wouldn't have cleaned up after itself if it had. Ghouls could certainly make a clean job of a disappearance, they'd seen that for themselves, but aside from that one rather unusual personal agenda, ghouls preferred the dead. Shapeshifters became people, they didn't disappear them.

Only two things operated this senselessly: demons and people.

The time line all but ruled out people. That implied demons, except there were no demon signs in this town. Hadn't been around the dates of any of the disappearances back at least as far as 1992. Some demons could cover their tracks, minimize their effects on weather like someone holding in a cough, but not reliably. Besides which, if a demon had taken Sam, shouldn't Dean have had some company by now? He hadn't exactly been subtle. And even if he went with the demonic hypothesis, it left him in the same place: looking for the common denominator among the victims.

Why would demons target seventeen, or more likely sixteen, people with no genetic, social, professional, geographic, demographic, or other-graphic connection to each other, only about half of whom were natives of the town where they went missing, starting in 1963? Well, why did demons ever take people? They took them if they could use them. What sort of people were useful to demons? People with powers, right? People freaky things happened around. The freakiest thing anybody had ever observed about any of these people was that Anthony Marquez had apparently been devoted to peanut butter and margarine sandwiches. Okay, right, that didn't take very long.

He was spinning his wheels, and somewhere, Sam was running out of time.

Dean crammed his fist in his mouth and calmed himself. They'd been separated on jobs before, plenty of times. This was no different. Wasn't going to be any different.

He started to dial Bobby again but hung up halfway through because he couldn't take worrying about both of them right now. He wiped his hand over his mouth and stared at the wall.

Jacob Dorner's Facebook profile picture had been a scan of an old college crew team head shot. Sam had printed it off in case his profile got taken down, which had finally happened sometime this morning. Blue eyes, brown hair, tanned skin, square jaw, confident smile, top-shelf orthodontics. For a few months in 1995, when Dad had parked them in a school in Putnam County to track a river sprite, Dean had specialized in poaching the girlfriends of exactly this variety of dude. He stared at the picture for long minutes.

It wasn't quite true that nothing freaky had ever happened to any of these people.

* * *

The angle and diameter of the pipe obliged Sam to crawl along it on his belly. He heard more than felt something flake off the sides of it as he moved, and despite himself, he shuddered. Thank God Dean wasn't here to see.

After only a few feet, the pipe bent sharply upwards. Sam learned this by ramming his forehead into the wall of it. He'd been able to see a little out in the chamber, but in here, the darkness was solid, so thick he thought he could feel it on his skin, oily and crawling with filth. Gingerly, trying not to think about anything under his fingernails, he mapped it with his hands. It ran vertically upwards.

Goddamn it.

The concrete burned on the abrasions he already had when he started shuffling his way up the pipe. He tried to focus on what kind of hellspawn he might find waiting for him at the top. There was little if anything he could do to fight back if he did, considering that he didn't even have shoes much less weapons, but it beat thinking about whatever else had come down this pipe.

As it turned out, though, the only thing waiting for him was steel rebar. He managed to find that with his hands instead of his head. Four bars were set into the opening in a crude crosshatch grate, and Sam braced his back and knees against the walls of the pipe, reached up, and shook one. It did not move.

"Who's there?"

The alarm in the voice was simple and immediate. Human. Familiar. Sam turned his face up to the bars and realized he could see a little of the same murky light there'd been in his cell. "Lindsey?"

Silence. Then bare feet slapping over concrete. The voice was even closer when he heard it again. _"Sam?"_

He found himself grinning just out of the sheer, arational relief of being within reach of other people. "Yeah."

"How'd you get up here?"

_I'm a ninja,_ Dean would have replied. Sam's mouth tugged into a smile despite himself. "Shimmied up the pipe. It's not that far."

"Litner never did that." She sounded almost dazed.

"Who?"

"Litner. The one down there before you."

Sam laid off trying to get one of the bars to twist. He mentally ran through the victim list he'd come up with, then did it again. "What do you mean, the one before me? Did you say Whitmore? Was his name Brendan?"

"No, I said _Litner_. He never gave any other name but that. Old homeless guy. He didn't last that long. A month, maybe. I don't know. Not like you can tell time in this place. Fucking asshole, anyway."

Homeless. No wonder he hadn't shown up in Sam's searches—even if someone had reported him missing, the police had probably dismissed it out of hand. He had a sinking feeling in his stomach. How many others had he missed? "Who else has been in here?"

"How should I know? There wasn't any ID on the skeletons."

"Alive, I mean." He shifted. His back was starting to ache; he'd have to go back down soon. "Anthony Marquez, Brendan Whitmore, Cara Pryor—did you ever meet any of them? Or someone who had?"

"No. Just Litner down in the room you're in now and Marian. And now you and Jacob."

Sam turned his face up to the opening, but didn't put his head through. He thought he could see the dark outline of someone squatting a few feet away, but his eyes could have been playing tricks on him. "Is Marian in there with you?"

"Yeah. Asleep. She does a lot of that. We all do a lot of that. It's the only thing in here to do."

Sam couldn't accept that. He knew Dean would come for him, but he couldn't just sit here, useless, until he did. For one thing, there was still the spirit to be dealt with, and for that, they needed to understand what the hell was happening here. He had to learn all he could, be ready to hand his brother that weapon at least if he couldn't lend a hand with any others.

For another, the more time passed, the stronger grew the niggling fear that something could have happened to Dean while Sam was too busy sitting around down here with his thumb up his ass to watch out for him.

He tugged restlessly at one of the bars. "I don't get it. Marian's been down here since… almost two years, now. You've been gone five months. Why keep you two alive for so long but kill the others?"

She snorted. "'Keeping us alive' isn't how I'd put it. And I don't think it killed the others; they just… died."

His stomach growled again, painfully this time. "When does it feed us, anyway?"

A pause. He heard her shuffle over the concrete, and then the outline of a face appeared above him. It was beyond gaunt.

"What do you mean, feed us?"

* * *

Dean flashed a badge. "Agent Barrett, out of the field office. I'm here for the electronics on the Jacob Dorner case."

The District 1 desk officer was young and pretty, but Dean skipped over flirtatious and went straight to stiff and overbearing: his very most convincing government employee demeanor. With Bobby MIA and Rufus dead, he couldn't afford to be challenged. The number on his card for his "supervisor" would ring to dial tone.

Unfortunately, the desk officer was not overawed. "I wasn't aware of a joint operation on that case," she said, about as whimsical as the love child of Bear Stearns and the Yakuza.

Well, why _wasn't_ she overawed? Where was the justice in that?

Dean replied in kind. "Isn't one," he said brusquely. "I'm here on the other disappearances in the area; just wanted to take a look."

Her eyes flicked over him once, and then she picked up her phone and hit an internal extension. "Yeah, Obaid here. Could you send Gutierrez my way? Agent from the FBI field office here for her."

Dean cursed mentally.

_They weren't victims of opportunity. They were chosen. If they were chosen, there had to be criteria. There's something connecting them._ Sam had thought that maybe he could have gotten somewhere, if only he'd had access to Dorner's missing computer. Dean hadn't been thrilled about helping him get it at the time, and he was getting less enthusiastic by the minute. It was a bit late to ditch out now, though.

A slight woman in her late thirties appeared from out of the bullpen, extending her hand for an easy shake and sizing him up unobtrusively. Shit. "Detective Jennifer Gutierrez. The Dorner disappearance is my case. Can I help you with something, Agent…?"

Her demeanor was outwardly friendlier than that of her guard dog, but Dean had a feeling she was going to be no more swayable. "Barrett. Was hoping to see the electronics I understand were collect from Jacob Dorner's home."

Gutierrez leaned against the duty officer's desk and regarded him. "Now, why would you want to do that?"

He gave her a tight smile. "Does it matter?"

"It does to me. And it's my case, so it should to you."

Of all the times for the Mulder and Scully mystique to fail, it had to be now. "Suffice to say that the Bureau has its own interest in the matter."

She smiled. "No."

"Pardon?"

"No, it does not suffice. That's not how this works, Agent; you know it, and while maybe small town departments and green cadets don't, I know it. Come back with an information-sharing request through the proper channels and we'll talk." She turned to go.

"Hang on, hang on!"

She turned back to him. "Okay, listen." He dropped his voice. "Look, I'm sorry for the botched cloak-and-dagger stuff, it's just…" _My brother's missing, and someone will pay._ "…The truth is, I came down here on a hunch of my own. I'm here looking into some other disappearances in the area; that's the official business. Now, I don't know if yours is connected, but I just… I've got a feeling. Nothing I can take to a judge, nothing I can take to my supervisor, just… a feeling." He searched her face. "You might have heard about some of them: Lindsey Chase, Anthony Marquez, Brendan Whitmore, Cara Pryor—"

Just for a second, he saw a flicker of something on her face. It was gone in an instant, but it had been there. "Marian Daniels," he finished. He watched her face and spread his hands. "You show me yours, I'll show you mine."

Gutierrez was impassive. "You have reason to think Dorner was moved out of state?"

"No, but—"

"Involved in a federal crime?"

"No—"

She turned away again. "Come back when you do and we'll talk."

* * *

The Narragansett Bay sewer system is among the oldest in the United States. In 1869, following numerous cholera epidemics, ambitious plans were drawn up by J. Herbert Shedd for no fewer than sixty-five combined sewer overflows (CSOs) to drain into the rivers and harbor, which were then constructed in the 1870s. Shedd's report on the project in 1874 brought him engineering fame and for years served as the model for sanitation throughout America.

Vomiting the combined pollutants of a major population center into a natural waterway every time it rains has certain deleterious effects over time. Parts of the bay are permanently closed to shellfishing. To make matters worse, Providence's sewage treatment plant, the largest of its type when it was built in 1901, was dumping a further sixty-five million gallons of un- or partially treated sewage into the Narragansett and its tributaries.

Accordingly, in 1993, new plans were rolled out for overflow abatement: five CSO interceptors, six miles of deep rock storage tunnels, seven drop shafts for collection, and sewer separation in twelve areas. Construction didn't actually begin until 2001, and by 2012, phase II was underway, expected to conclude in 2014.

Providence's sewers continue to expand the while. Like any circulatory system, it grows to support the structures built upon it. The city's roads accommodate the movement of about 180,000 people. Its sewers accommodate the movement of about 400,000,000 gallons of water each day.

They're quite large.

* * *

_"This is Robert Singer. I'm on a business trip and not currently reachable. If this is an emergency, hang up—"_

* * *

Up to now, neither Dean nor Sam had looked at Cara Pryor very hard. She'd gone missing over a year ago, and they'd only run the list down as far back as Brendan Whitmore. In the papers and basic search results, there was nothing to set her apart from the others.

In the initial police report Dean had managed to get into, on the other hand, there was. Two things, in fact: a keyring and a shoe.

Dean sat in the Impala at the southernmost end of Waterfront Drive, studying the evidence photos. A homeless man had found the keys caught on the grate of a storm drain up the street, with no usable prints other than Cara's. The shoe had turned up under a van with a flat tire and three parking tickets about twenty-five feet north from the storm drain. It was one of those technicolor, expensive running shoes, size seven-and-a-half, smeared with dirt and heavily scratched along one side. Drag marks, most likely.

Supernatural assailants were about as likely to drag a body as anybody else, but there had been _zero_ physical evidence on any of the others. Cara Pryor broke pattern. The question was, was that because she was important, or because she didn't belong on the list?

He glanced out the windshield at the surroundings. A few fat raindrops spattered on the glass. Though still sunny in the east, the sky was purple-gray in the west with the spring squall brewing there. 

Cara's picture in her police file was a professional head shot from her company's website, showing her smiling with the slight deer-in-the-headlights expression of someone who had never gotten comfortable with cameras. She was pretty, athletic, a bit square in the face with medium brown hair and blue eyes. She had moved to Providence a couple of months before her disappearance when she took a job in HR for a large insurance company. The documentation photos of her keyring made for a bland biography: keys for apartment, mailbox, car, office; cards for Whole Foods, FitGenius Gym, library. Her file mentioned no friends outside of work, no hobbies, no political involvement, no church attendance, nothing. She was just a shy young woman making her way in life.

The rain was just starting in earnest as Dean climbed out of the car. He wasn't even sure what the hell he was doing here. It had been over a year; there wouldn't be anything left to find. But Cara was the only one where they knew the site of her disappearance. He couldn't afford not to check it out.

Sidewalk ran along Waterfront Drive parallel to the Providence River, but there was also a pedestrian trail worn into the grass just a few yards away from it. It was just a narrow rut worn away by people who wanted to work out along the river and had something against concrete, overgrown to either side with brush and dotted with the usual roadside litter. The shoe the police had recovered had been a trail runner, with a spiky tread intended for natural surfaces. Dean followed the track north.

Soon it was pouring. The track was cut into the ground, so the spring storm turned it into a drainage ditch. The farther north he walked, the more run-down the buildings on the other side of the street were. They were hidden by trees and shrubbery more frequently, too, as the track worked through the trash growth that always overtook urban interstices. It was just late enough in spring for the leaves to really be out, and Cara Pryor had gone missing at about the same time of year. An area with quick, easy street access and plenty of natural cover. Frontage more industrial than residential. A good place to snatch someone.

He checked his position periodically against the locations marked on the map in the incident report, shielding his eyes against the rain, looking from side to side for—fuck knew what, he hoped he'd know it when he saw it. He was moving along, muttering under his breath, minding his own damned business (and the police's, technically, but they were the worst busybodies of them all, so fuck them) and trying to not to think about how long Sam had been missing (seventeen hours and fifty-one minutes) when he planted his foot in a watery hole in the ground and went down hard.

He was fine. It took more than a pit trap to hobble a Winchester; they'd both been trained to land correctly from exactly this sort of mishap by the time they were ten. His goddamned motherfucking shoe, however, was soaked. It was the shiny faux fed shoe, too. Fucking fuck. Dean picked himself up, took it off, and poured out rust-colored water while he stood on one leg.

He stared at the hole in the ground.

It was about a foot in diameter. Almost a foot of water was standing in it, and there was still six inches of room left. Any track like this would have irregularities, but not ones eighteen inches deep. Someone had dug this here. Dean thought about the dirt and scratches smeared over the side of Cara Pryor's shoe. Most people would have wrenched their ankle in a pit like this, maybe even broken it if they'd been running hard.

Dean stared around at the brush while the rain hissed into the river. He only knew of one species that set this kind of trap.

* * *

_Dean. Dean. Please get here, come get me, I'm sorry—_

"Sorry," said Sam, "I just want to make sure I heard you correctly. You've been down here five months, in the company of a woman who's been down here for twenty-two months, and you've been eating—what? Positive thinking? Cosmic vibrations?"

Lindsey laughed. There was genuine, if nasty, enjoyment in it. "Oh, my God. You actually thought there was gonna be _meal times."_

He felt a surge of anger that had nothing to do with the hunger pangs. "Answer the question for once."

"You are definitely my favorite, Sam. You? Are adorable."

Suspicion crept in upon him. "Come over here and touch my hand."

That cut off her laughter. "Why?"

"I want to test something."

"Yeah? Like whether you can twist my hand off? No thanks. Get the hell out of here before I piss on your head. This is our room."

"I don't want to hurt you. Just shake my hand and prove you're not a ghost."

"Oh, God, that shit again."

"Look. I'm going to reach my hand up, alright?" He did so, slowly, cautiously. "Come on, Lindsey, what am I going to do to you? I just want to get out of here, same as you. Just… just prove to me that there are really people in here with me."

For several seconds, he didn't think she would, but then her silhouette moved, animal-fast, and for half a second he felt bony warmth on his fingers. "There. Happy? Freak."

He let his breath out. "Thanks." Definitely not a ghost. "Lindsey? I'm going to go back down the pipe now."

"You shouldn't have climbed up it in the first place. You're wasting energy."

At the bottom of the shaft, Sam sat with his back against the vertical wall and his legs down the slope. An unpleasant thought occurred to him. "Uh, Lindsey? Do you _usually_ pee down here?"

Her voice floated down. "We don't shit down that one, though. Smells less if you keep them separated."

Sam closed his eyes and felt himself shudder on a cellular level. "Could you… not?"

"I hate to break this to you, but you're in a sewer. Guess what's in here."

Right. Great.

Which brought him back to his original question and increasingly unpleasant possible answers to the same. "You don't— You don't eat—"

"Our own shit?" she said with savage pleasure. "No. But people have, before. Litner did, before the end. Pretty sure that was what killed him, actually. He was in your room. Your room's the worst. Our room's the best."

"What do you mean?" Not that it mattered. It wasn't going to matter, because he was going to get the hell out of here before it did.

"We have the best water," she said smugly. "As good as tap."

"Okay," Sam said slowly, "but you can't live off water for five months. If it's not bringing you food, what are you eating?"

"Well, I guess it does feed us, in a way. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean to. You know that glow-in-the-dark fungus?"

Sam took a moment to make sense of her words. "Do you— Are you talking about the _ectoplasm,_ Lindsey?"

"Whatever you want to call it, Dr. Venkman."

A tiny line of the stuff was seeping from a seam in the pipe's wall. He stared at it in horrified fascination. It was sort of reddish-orange, sort of brown, sort of black, glistening like slime mold. "You can't be serious."

"You want to hold out for Boston Market, that's your business."

His stomach turned over. "I'm not that hungry, thanks."

"You will be." For once, her voice wasn't vicious or mocking. It was simply matter-of-fact.

* * *

Gripping the sink, Dean stared into the bathroom mirror. Traffic sounds filtered in from the Shell station's parking lot. Red was starting to rim his eyes, circles to show under them. He couldn't handle all-nighters like he used to. Long hauls were for the young and the very old.

His soaked shirt hung open around him as he leaned on the sink and swiped the pad of his thumb across the bottom of the phone screen.

1:11 p.m.

Around six in the morning was the last time he'd tried Sam's phone. He didn't much want to do it, now, but he knew he had to, just in case. He hit speed dial.

_"This is Sam. Leave a message."_

Didn't even ring. Straight to voice mail, which meant it was either turned off or destroyed. Dean hung up; if his hand shook, it was probably because he'd eaten nothing but Red Bull and No-Doz in almost twenty-four hours.

Sam had been gone nearly as long.

He felt numb. He knew he ought to feel something more, but he couldn't. He just couldn't. They'd been down this road too many times before, and he was out of blood to give.

_I can't do this anymore._

He experienced an urge, so absurd it made laughter bubble up the back of his throat, to climb in the car, put her in gear, and floor it all the way out of Providence. Just drive away. He didn't want to go through the motions, had never cared about whatever took these people, couldn't see what they had in common, and seriously, how many times was he supposed to do this?

How many more times was he supposed to do this?

He diverted his fist at the last moment from the mirror to the electric hand-dryer. The snap and clunk inside suggested that it wouldn't be functioning again.

His pulse wasn't racing. It was slow and heavy in his neck, like air pockets chugging through a gas line: _Sam. Sam. Sam. Sam._

Carefully he buttoned up his shirt and folded down the collar. "Cas? You there?" he asked, toneless.

Outside a soda thumped in the machine, but there was no rustle of wings.

It was fine. He'd figure it out.

* * *

Dean had run out of duct tape and was affixing things to the wall with chewing gum. The map he kept at the center, the site of Sam's disappearance a pink highlighter circle, other last-seen locations in yellow, and Cara, the odd one out, with a green asterisk. Around it he arrayed all the other scraps of the case: Bethany Dorner's obituary photo. A picture of Lindsey Chase, standing with a bland, professional smile behind a wizened figure in a wheelchair. A xerox of Brendan Whitmore's write-up at work for calling out sick for improbable amounts of time. Cara Pryor's keys and shoe. Marian Daniels' MADD accolades. This way, he could stare at the pink dot, make it the center of his existence, and let the other information swirl on his peripheral vision until such time as it all coalesced into an answer. The technique wasn't doing a damned thing for him, so far, but it was something he'd seen Sam do, so he did it now in an attempt to work some kind of sympathetic magic.

Cara Pryor broke pattern. The most likely explanation was that she wasn't part of it at all, and the rational course of action was to forget about her and focus his energies elsewhere. So why couldn't he shake the feeling that she mattered?

Here was where Sam would have told him, _Because she does matter, Dean, of course she matters._ But that wasn't how it was.

Detective Gutierrez thought she was connected to Jacob, at the very least. None of the others had gotten a reaction out of her, but there'd definitely been something there when he mentioned Cara. Dean wished he could just get her to share what she had. To con her into a sharing-and-caring mood would take more resources than he had right now, though. Maybe it was time to just level with her—

No. If he went to the police, not only would he be admitting defeat, but they'd arrest him for impersonating a federal agent and he wouldn't be able to help Sam at all. Prison would be an inconvenience for him, but it could kill his brother.

He pulled out his phone and scrolled through his contacts. His thumb hovered over _Lisa_ for a long moment and almost pressed it. Then he scrolled back up and cycled through Bobby's numbers once more without result.

He was starting to crash; the world was growing hazy at the corners. Without quite knowing how, he found himself sitting on Sam's (Sam's though Sam had never been here) bed with his notebook in his hands.

It was an unruled moleskine. Sam had bought it in a Borders where they were cybersquatting back in 2007, paying twice what a knockoff version would have cost at a Walmart and easily three times what it was worth, and Dean had ragged on him for it gleefully, all the harder when he found the little leaflet in the back going on about how this was the notebook of Ernest Hemingway and William Shakespeare and probably God, or something. Sam had shrugged and said he wanted it to last a long time, but he'd bridled, too, just a little. This was a piece of the well-groomed existence Sam had tried to purchase for himself, a little piece he'd thought maybe he didn't have to give up even if he filled it with protection sigils instead of legal reflections.

And it was a damned nice notebook. Dean had to grant that. The cover had a rich grain, and the pages a smooth surface that took ink like silk even if Dean watched Sam scrawl in it with motel ballpoints instead of a Parker fountain pen.

Sam had apparently seen him looking, because Dean got one for his birthday. Quad-rule.

Dean's fingertips trailed along the edges of the pages as he turned them. How could someone so pathologically tidy have handwriting like this?

There was still room left in this thing. Dean's, too. The whole point was to have a rapid reference, so they only entered the very most valuable or frequently referenced items: greatest hits of the Key of Solomon. Summoning rituals. Exorcisms. Incantations for keeping shit dead. Wards of all kinds. And—there it was.

Location spell.

None of the entries were dated, but Dean knew the date on this one: late 2008. Even after everything, it had the power to make him bitter, though he'd deny it to Sam's face and probably Bobby's.

He put it back in Sam's duffel. It didn't really matter, because there were no demon signs in this town.

He took out Rufus's address book, instead, and tapped it on his knee with his lips clamped in a line. Rufus had a good, long run; whom would he call right now? A psychic? There probably were a few in here, bona fide. But Missouri had been one of the strongest psychics they'd ever seen, and asking her where their father was hadn't done a damned thing. Plucking "facts out of thin air" took serious juice. That kind of juice didn't come from good places.

The only psychic Dean had ever personally seen do it, in fact, was Sam.

Who, then? There had to be someone.

Rufus had been more organized than Bobby, and most names had some sort of notation beside them, however cryptic: _Silversmith. Infosec (Prague). Pet supplies. Cargo and transport._ Of the ones that didn't, Dean found he could identify the hunters by the sheer number of phone numbers crossed out and re-entered. The names themselves, though, only got crossed out once.

He recognized some names, but none he could trust with this. Here and there were names labeled _folk artist or art dealer_ —shamans and people like Bela Talbot, Dean suspected. A lot of the latter were crossed out. For all Bela's talk of not being willing to risk her own skin, the stats suggested her profession wasn't a lot safer than theirs.

Below a card for someone in the mathematics department at Cambridge (her interests included "random matrix theory, high-dimensional hypothesis test, and shape-constrained estimation—maybe Dean had it all wrong and Sam hadn't filched this for any sinister purposes whatsoever; maybe he'd just taken it to jack off to), a _J. Cl—s C—by, 304-555-7284_ had been all but obliterated. Scrawled out angrily, rather than neatly removed. Dean had seen Dad strike out names like that. Hell, he'd seen John's contact info get the same treatment on Bobby's own oil-spotted list in the kitchen drawer beside the phones. That wouldn't have been particularly interesting in itself, but a few pages later, _Clove Canby, 304-555-7284_ was there again.

And struck through again.

Fully twenty pages later, the number had been entered one more time, and this time left to stand: _J. Clovis Canby, 304-555-7284, 6 Plato Lane, Mt. Storm, West Virginia._ There was no card or email address. In the notes field, Rufus had written _Practical application (husbandry)._

"Practical application of _husbandry_?" Dean muttered. "What in the hell does he husband?"

Dean wiped a hand over his face and shoved the book back in with Sam's over-bleached socks. To go another night and dawn without finding Sam felt like a line, one that made his throat tighten with every hour closer to it he got, the hair-thin line between _missing_ and _gone_. Someone like Bela could probably help him, but the danger with people like that was that you never knew what other debts they might have or how you might fit into their payment plan. They'd learned that the hard way. If he didn't have anything by sundown, maybe he'd start looking for shortcuts. But it was too risky for now.

Anyway, he wasn't so impotent yet that he had to call up a fucking kitchen witch to solve his problems. If he didn't have enough to go on, he'd just have to go out and get some more.

* * *

There were six skeletons in his chamber.

Sam had to count them by touch; all but the one on the stairs were in the deep channel at the end of the platform he'd woken up on, and it was too dark to see even outlines down there. The bones were jumbled together with scraps of rotting cloth, like one after another they had been dumped down there into a growing pile. It took time, but eventually he was able to dig out five skulls.

He left the sixth where it was.

There were outflow pipes set into the wall down here, to match the inflow pipes that led to the others' chambers. Two were bricked up. One had been filled with concrete. One had been fitted with a grate, and Sam thought he could hear water moving somewhere beyond it. He couldn't see the grate, but it felt the same as the one over Jacob's pipe: cast iron, slotted with gaps he could just fit his hand through, about an inch thick. A small dam of detritus and slime had accumulated at its bottom.

He found that by touch, as well, and had nothing but himself to wipe his hand off on. He was grateful that he couldn't see his own nails. Rats squeaked somewhere off in the bowels of the place.

When he'd lost consciousness before, when the ghost came to Jacob, he'd gone down in front of a pipe about four inches wide set into the wall. It, too, had been filled with concrete, the cheap, coarse-gritted stuff used for high-volume projects like, well, filling pipes. Water welled from the rounded end of that concrete and fell in fat droplets. Sam crouched beneath it and let it fall on his fingers, wishing it were bleach. He wasn't sure, but he thought it was dripping faster than when it had first woken him.

Silence had fallen over the sewer. Sam could feel it digging at him, eroding his confidence like the water slowly grooving the floors in this place, and knew he had to push back against it.

He settled himself in the corner between Jacob's and Lindsey's pipes. The glowing ecto spilled down the wall in a few places, forming pretty impressive mats of the stuff and staining the floor with rusty light. Not for the first time, he wondered what kind of spirit they were dealing with. It would be kind of fascinating, if not for the part where he was trapped in a sewer with three innocent people.

"Lindsey? Jacob?"

Unhappy noise from Jacob, something that sounded vaguely like _Tryin'a_ sleep.

"Hey, no, Jacob, not right now. I need you to tell me as much about the room you're in as you can. So that we can get out of here, remember? Jacob?"

"He'll probably be out of it for a while," Lindsey's voice floated down to him. "It takes it out of you when it visits."

So did not eating for three days or more. Sam needed to come up with a plan while he still had the strength to execute it, and while the others still had the strength to help him.

"How often does it come?" he asked.

Silence. Then she cracked up.

"Lindsey?"

Her belly-laugh tapered off into a giggle by way of a snort. "Sorry," she managed, "let me just consult my calendar. And my watch. Shit, you know what, let me just check my phone, my whole life's on there—"

"I get it."

"No, you don't. You will, though."

Sam rested his head back against the wall. "'And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware that there should be time no longer.'"

"What?"

"Revelation 10. King James Version."

"A Jesus freak. Great. Just what we needed."

Sam didn't bother to correct her. "I don't need an exact time, Lindsey, just an estimate. Your internal clock is probably pretty far off by now, but you still have one. How long does it feel like, between visits? Hours? Days? Weeks? What?"

"Days." A pause. "Should be coming to see you soon, I'd say."

"I'm not so sure about that, actually. I don't think it wants the same thing from me."

Not that she'd been the cheeriest of companions up to now, but he was taken aback by the hate in her voice next. "You think you're so special."

"Actually, I don't. I'm here by accident—I remember I was looking for Jacob, and I think it took me because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I doubt it cares about me. But it chose you. It chose Jacob, and Marian, and fifteen other people that I know of, starting sometime in the 1960s. Something sets you apart."

A long silence went by. "Lindsey?"

"Sets us apart like how?"

"I don't know. That's what I need you for. We have to figure out what you all have in common."

"We all live in a sewer."

"Lindsey, I'm serious. Think. What do you have in common with the others?"

" _Nothing._ Jacob's some sort of sales guy, Litner was a fucking hobo, Marian's batshit insane, and I—I'm _normal."_

Sam sighed. They were going to need Jacob awake to get anywhere on this topic. "Okay. Let's just focus on finding a way out, for now. Tell me about your room."

"Why? I thought your daddy was going to come and pick you up."

He counted silently to ten. "My brother. And yes, he will find us. He'll come back with dynamite, if he has to. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't see what we can do ourselves. Come on, that's common sense and you know it."

A grudging few seconds passed. "Fine, it's not like you can get in here to steal from us. What do you want to know?"

"Everything. Start with the shape of it."

"Rectangular. Well, sort of L-shaped, if you count vertical; the ceiling is high at this end, low for the rest of it, maybe six feet high."

"Why's it higher at one end?"

"How should I know? I can't even see up there."

"Alright, never mind that. What's in the room? Any feature, Lindsey. Anything."

"I mean, there's pipes; it's a sewer. Little pipes on the ceiling, a kind of big one along the wall—that's the one that leaks, the good water."

"Where does it run off? The pipe I climbed up is pretty much dry."

"There's a pit-thing down at the other end with like a metal cage set into it. That's where we're crapping, if you were still all concerned about your hygiene. And a door on the other side of it. I guess that's how it got us in here, but there's no handle and it's metal, thick, and anyway, it's locked. Might as well be a wall."

"Anything else? Do you have any iron in there with you at all, aside from that grate at the top of the pipe?"

"There's a metal plate across part of the floor, like a divider, about two feet tall? Not sure what it's for, other than tripping over. That might be iron."

"Anything you can pick up?"

"No."

Of course there wasn't. The spirit had been careful to strip them of tools of any kind; it would hardly leave them weapons. Sam wondered what the iron ledge was for. He wondered what this whole place was for. It didn't make sense.

"Wait. Lindsey, is your ceiling vaulted?"

"Vaulted?"

"Yeah. Curved."

"No."

His mind raced. "I don't think we're that far down."

"Why not?"

"Most of any given sewer system isn't, for one thing. And your ceiling would be curved if there were much ground on top of it. It would have to be, to bear the load."

She barked a laugh, but there was a hitch in it. "I'm going to die like two feet into the ground? That's even better."

Sam grinned as he climbed to his feet. "I don't think we're going to die, at all."

* * *

Unlike the spacious downtown headquarters, Providence PD's District 4 was housed in what was basically a strip mall. Dean hadn't had any trouble getting in here yesterday morning, but he thought the patina acquired from thirty hours awake lent him extra credence.

"Yeah, hi, um, here to look at the case file for Lindsey Chase again?" Dean showed his badge cursorily to the desk officer. She was a motherly type in her forties instead of another gimlet-eyed stone wall like at Gutierrez's substation, thankfully. He didn't have the energy.

Officer Marks gave him a half-sympathetic, half-amused look before typing into her system. "What was the last name, again?"

"Chase. First name Lindsey with an E."

She paused. "Sorry, it isn't here."

"What are you talking about? I just used it yesterday."

"It's on request. Sorry."

His pulse jumped in his neck. "Where is it?"

"Downtown."

"Downtown like District 1 downtown?"

"Yep."

"What about the Whitmore file? Brendan Whitmore?"

Keys clicked. "Also out."

"Let me guess: downtown?"

"Uh-huh." She glanced up at him. "You could view them there. Want me to call ahead for you?"

He forced a plastic smile onto his face. "Nah. That's okay."

* * *

_"This is Robert Singer. I'm on a business trip and not currently—"_

* * *

"District 9 switchboard, how may I direct your call?"

Dean flattened his printout of the Pryor disappearance file over the steering wheel and read the investigating officer's name in the waning light. "Yeah, hi, I'm trying to reach Officer Edward Munoz?"

"One moment, please."

It was more than one moment. It was quite a few moments. Eventually the recorded voice droning about safety initiatives cut out, only for the switchboard operator to come back on. "May I say who's calling?"

A little warning flare went up in the back of his brain. "Agent Barrett, FBI Boston Division."

"One moment, please."

Dean drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. The hold recording advised him not to leave valuables visible in his car. He balled up the wreckage of his drive-through dinner, climbed out of the car, and crossed the parking lot to dump it into the restaurant's trash can. The hold recording wanted him to know that carbon monoxide poisoning was a serious issue. He climbed back into the car. Dual smoke/CO detectors were available at many home improvement retailers—

"I'm sorry, sir, Officer Munoz is out in the field. Would you like to leave a—?"

Dean was already turning the key in the ignition as he hung up.

* * *

"If there's a way in, there's a way out." Sam ran his fingers over the grate over Jacob's pipe. "It didn't teleport us in here; I've seen evidence that some spirits might be able to, but this one dragged me. I remember. Sort of. Anyway, I've got the scrapes to prove it."

"Well, thank fucking God you're here to tell us that, because it never occurred to anyone else."

Jacob mumbled semi-consciously for them to shut up. Lindsey ignored Jacob, and Sam ignored Lindsey.

"When it brought me in here, did you see anything? Hear anything? Or when it brought in Jacob, or Litner?"

"No. It does something to us when it brings someone in. When Litner showed up one day, I thought we'd just slept through the whole thing, and we probably did, but I think it _kept_ us asleep. Then with Jacob, it got cold and I thought it was coming for me, but I passed out, woke up, and he was there, instead. Same with you."

Okay, that wasn't great news, but it wasn't surprising, either. "What has Jacob said about his room?"

"Not much. He said the only way in was that pipe down there with you, but he might have lied."

They had to break this distrust if they were going to get anywhere. If Dean were here, he'd be able to do it; he was a natural leader, and what nature hadn't done in that department their father had. Sam, on the other hand, always tried to bring people together, but they could smell that he was weak underneath and the illusion of control always fell apart at the most catastrophic moment. Like Cold Oak. And the most damning thing was that he never saw it coming.

He paused and took a deep breath, trying to clear his head. He was starting to drift. Food and water were going to become very pressing, very soon.

Dean was looking for them, which meant that Dean would find them. That was simple fact, like the law of gravity. They needed to be ready to move when he did.

"Okay. First step, we need to find a way to get to each other. You're going to be the key to that, Lindsey."

"What, and let you freaks just—"

"You'd rather stay in here? Because that's what it comes down to. Listen. The top of the pipe up there is blocked with rebar, right?"

"Yeah." Suspicion was heavy in her voice.

"It felt like it was only set a couple inches down into the concrete. It's a grate, not a structural reinforcement"—He prayed, anyway.—"so that means the bars aren't that long."

"Okay…?"

"I want you to pick one and start trying to work it free."

Her laugh was incredulous. "I can't pull a metal bar straight out of concrete, Sam!"

"You probably can, Lindsey. It'll take time. A lot of time—hours, longer than I can stay at the top of the pipe, or I'd help." It was more likely to take weeks, but that didn't matter. What he needed was something to keep them occupied, to keep the poison of despair at bay until Dean arrived. "But it can be done. This concrete has to be at least sixty years old, and with enough work, enough energy, it should start to crumble."

"How do you know how old it is?"

"Because there are dead bodies in here, and they started going missing in 1963." He slipped his fingers between the holes in the grate over Jacob's pipe and tugged.

"Oh."

"Once you have a bar free, I can use it to work on the grate between me and Jacob—"

"You want me to rip iron out of concrete just to give it to you? Fuck yourself."

"Fine, free a bar, use it to smash the rest of the lip of that pipe, and we'll have _four_ bars. Tools are what's going to get us out of here, Lindsey. Think. It took away everything we could possibly use as a tool. I didn't even have a ballpoint on me when I woke up in here, did you?"

"No." Her tone was still a bit grudging, but he could hear the hope kindling in it, too. "Just my clothes. Wish I had my shoes."

He grunted and readjusted his grip on the grate. It hadn't budged, but he hadn't expected it to. Yet. Using small motions from his core, he rocked it up and down, trying to transfer as much energy from the motion to the grate, instead of his fingers, as possible. "It took my keys, my weapons—everything rigid. It wouldn't have stripped that stuff away if it didn't think it would make a difference. We need those bars. We can use them to break out of here, and we can use them to fight the spirit."

"Yeah, you said that before, when it was visiting Jacob, but I'm telling you, you can't hurt it. It—you just go right through it. And it goes through you."

"Spirits are repelled by iron."

"Then how's it get in here when there's iron over all the doors?"

Sam faltered in trying to jiggle the grate. "That's… a really good question, actually."

"Oh, God. You're full of it. This isn't going to work, you don't even know what it is—"

"I don't know everything about it, that's true. Spirits are all different; they used to be people. This one is doing things I've never seen another spirit do, but salt and iron are still our best bets. Lindsey. Calm down and listen to me."

She sobbed once, loudly, then gave a shaky laugh. "Is this were you ask me what I've got to lose?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Okay. I— Okay."

He closed his eyes in relief. "Good. You and Marian work on the bars up there; I'll work on the grates down here, and I'll look for anything else that could help. When Jacob wakes up, we'll get him to help, too."

"Marian's not… I don't think she can."

Sam released the grate and crawled up her pipe a little ways, not wanting to chance Jacob hearing. "How's she doing?" he called up quietly.

"I don't think she's going to last much longer."

She didn't sound particularly distressed about it, but Sam couldn't really fault her for that. To be trapped in here, for so long, and retain your basic sanity was enough of a victory. Normal emotional responses didn't stand a chance. As for Marian—it was a miracle she'd survived this long. By the sound of things, not all of her really had.

"Okay, well, we'll do what we can to get her out of here in time. If one of us manages to get out before the others, they can send back help. Just do what you can for her."

"What happens if it comes back while we're trying to escape? It's—it's _angry,_ Sam. I don't know much, but I know that, and it— If it catches us—"

He looked down at his hands. Rather, he looked down at where he knew his hands were; he was submerged in blackness, and he couldn't see the filth on his fingers from scrabbling over sewer walls and working elbow-deep in corpses.

"Is there really anything it can do to us that's going to be worse than dying here, Lindsey?"

She had no reply.

"Anyway." He climbed out of the pipe, back into the murky light. It seemed still stronger; his eyes must be adapting in earnest now. "Like I said, I don't think it's really interested in me. I might be able to, I dunno. Watch, be an early warning system for us."

It seemed like it was cooler than it had been, but that might have been a natural result of slowing down after his exertion earlier. He needed water, but any water in here was going to be hazardous at best, and he couldn't risk getting sick while there was any other option. Dean would need him ready to fight.

Someone whimpered. He couldn't tell whether it was Jacob or Marian. He also couldn't help either of them right now, so he tried to ignore the sound.

"If one bar seems looser than the others, even the tiniest bit, start with that one," he called up to Lindsey. "No matter how long it's taking, keep working on the same bar. It's about transferring enough energy to the surface between metal and concrete to begin to break it down."

"Okay."

He climbed carefully over Litner's skeleton on the stairs and down into the trench where the rest were. The floor was angled from either side into a trough, here, a few inches of water standing in it. "Water" was in fact probably not so much the term as "biohazardous soup," but Sam's interest wasn't in drinking it. Liquid had to drain somewhere.

"Use small motions. You want to transfer as much of that to the bar itself as you can, not exhaust yourself heaving on it."

"Does this really work?" she shouted back. "Have you ever actually done this?"

"Not anything this hard, no." Understatement. "But the principle is the same. It's going to be frustrating, but it should be possible." He patted over the wall in the dark until he found the other grated opening. Crouching, he sniffed and listened.

Yes. He could definitely hear—

Someone keened from upstairs. This time it was definitely Marian. Lindsey gasped. "Oh, God."

Sam climbed back up to the platform. Vibrations seemed to hum against the soles of his feet, but that could have been the way his skin just plain crawled in here. "Lindsey? Is she—?"

"She only does that when—"

Jacob was awake, now, too, shouting hoarsely. "No! No! Not again, get out of here—"

Waves of air pressure rolled across the room, making his ears throb. Each was colder than the last, more intense. Like approaching footsteps.

Sam planted planted his hand against the wall in their corner, then recoiled when a rivulet of ecto streamed down on it from the ceiling. "Lindsey, what the hell? Why's it back for him so soon?"

If she had an answer, he never heard it. His breath turned to smoke in the dimness.

Then he turned, and he saw the ghost.

* * *

Going back to Dorner's apartment after banging on doors the evening before with all the subtlety of a Quiet Riot concert was risky. Too bad. Dean tossed back another No-Doz and climbed out of the car.

He was parked a few streets over from Dorner's apartment building. Glancing about for any observers, he checked the slide on his Colt .45 before shouldering his backpack and moving off through the deepening shadows.

It had to mean something that Sam had disappeared from here. He'd told Dean that he'd found nothing, but there had to be _something,_ some little thing that Sam just hadn't had context for. Dean turned onto Dorner's street, taking in the traffic patterns as the evening deepened, the thump of a stereo from an open window somewhere, the clumps of people standing around talking outside the coffee shop where he'd asked after Sam last night, the obstacles in the alleys between buildings. On-street parking was full, and about half the street lights were out. Good.

He accessed apartment 212 via the fire escape and climbed into maybe the most yuppified living room he'd ever laid eyes on. It was like a Pottery Barn showroom in here. Neutral colors on the floors, black-and-white photographs on the walls, uncomfortable throw pillows on the couch. Jacob Dorner had a fucking _breakfast bar,_ and for this man's sake Sam was missing.

EMF came first. Dean got nothing. He ran it one more time, checking nooks and crannies for sulfur, but the place was clean. Then again, Max Miller's house had been, too. Nevertheless, Sam had clearly gotten close enough to something to be worth taking. He moved on.

He didn't see the pencil-width camera lens mounted in the smoke detector in the entryway.

As he moved through the place, using a penlight sparingly and stepping quietly, he couldn't help comparing it to Lisa's. This was cleaner, but probably got cleaned less often. The furnishings came from the same sort of middling, _normal_ aesthetic, if a less homey one. Work, sleep, and recreation were neatly compartmentalized in that way that, after a lifetime on the road, Dean couldn't help finding sort of unnatural.

But Dorner's home was different, somehow, and though he hadn't had time to notice it when he passed through here last night, it was bugging the shit out of him now. It finally slid into focus when he returned to the living room: when he'd lived with Lisa, the bedroom had been where they'd kept the candid photographs, the slightly embarrassing art objects, the few pictures Dean had of his parents. The most personal artifacts in the most private space.

Dorner's apartment was inside-out. There weren't just more personal touches in the living room; all of them were in the living room. Family photos, school mementos, recreational gear—all of it was on display in the rooms where this man had balanced his checkbook and entertained his friends. You could tell a lot about a guy from his spank-bank material, but if Dorner had had any, it must have been on his computer or tablet—there was nothing in the bedside table or under the mattress. The closest thing to a personal touch in the room where he'd slept was one of those shitty black-and-white art prints that frankly looked like what you'd find on the walls of a moderately cozy bank lobby.

Smiling parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles adorned the walls, uniformly matted and framed. Childhood shots were mixed in, and there were a smattering professional portraits of (Dean assumed) Jacob in sailor suits and shit like that and a little girl in the sorts of frilly dresses parents put little girls in to get their pictures taken. The dead twin, presumably. But she hadn't died until the tail-end of their senior year of high school, according to Sam's background file. Where were all the candid photos of her?

He found what he was looking for in a reading nook to one side of the living area, where a photograph was perched on the edge of a bookshelf. Dean picked up the frame. It was recognizably Jacob Dorner and what had to be his twin sister. What had her name been? Bethany? She reminded Dean vaguely of someone, but that might just have been because hers was ultimately a very nondescript face—brown hair, blue eyes, square jaw, a female version of Jacob. They were holding a ridiculously narrow boat over their heads and looked about eighteen. Just before she'd died, then.

Twins. Dean rubbed his thumb over the base of the frame, smudging out the prints he left almost automatically. People said that twins were closer than other siblings. He didn't buy it, personally, but a handful of times over the years, he'd wondered about it: what would they have been like, he and Sam, if they'd been twins? He wondered if Sam thought about it, too.

The pictures of Bethany on the walls were all for show, staged portraits from ages that Dorner probably could barely even remember that froze her in childhood and glossed over the tragedy of her death. But he'd kept this one that showed her exactly as she'd been when he lost her and had placed it at eye level right beside his reading chair. He thought about her every day. Despite himself, Dean felt sorry for him.

The door exploded.

"Police! Hands in the air!"

Dean was moving before the door finished giving way. Flashlight beams painted his silhouette across the walls as he dove down the hallway toward the bedroom. Only seconds later did his brain process the brief glimpse he'd gotten of Detective Gutierrez, framed in the corridor light. She had not looked as surprised to see him as he was to see her.

There was one window in Dorner's bedroom. It was a corner unit, and where the fire escape window faced the back of the next block, this one looked out on an alley that cut perpendicular to the main street. Dean threw up the sash. Plastic shards flew as the locking mechanism broke.

They were on the second floor. The alley was approximately ten feet wide. Beneath Dorner's window was asphalt. Across the alley only a couple feet to the left was a dumpster. Heavily equipped people were pounding into the room behind him. Dean jumped.

He overshot, bounced off the vinyl siding of the adjacent building, rolled off the plastic doors set into its angled top, and fell face-first into the asphalt. Blinding pain in his right shoulder made him roll into a ball.

The entire dumpster suddenly gonged, and it was so deafening that he could barely hear Gutierrez scream at someone to _"Hold your fire!"_ as he shook his head, trying to clear it. He grabbed with his good arm onto the dump truck slot on the side and heaved himself to his feet with a grunt.

Precious seconds went by before he got his feet moving under him. An officer ran into the mouth of the alleyway, looked up first and at Dean approaching second, and started to draw his weapon. "Freeze—"

Dean hit him and kept going.

An unmarked car and a patrol vehicle were pulled up in front of Dorner's apartment building. Waiting for the no-knock squad, who must still be tripping over themselves getting out of the building, but should be thundering into the lobby—right about now.

It was mainly blind luck that an SUV passed a few inches behind him instead of straight through him, because he didn't check the main street before he cut across it. He heard orders shouted behind him, registered the coffee shop's suddenly much less populated storefront, then disappeared into the opposite alley headed north.

Fresh, cold adrenaline dumped into his blood. Objects percussed on his senses in bursts: fence. Door. House. Car. He'd been here before, but his mind was skidding, couldn't join up the route. Where the fuck was he parked?

The troughs between rows of buildings scrambled the sounds of the pursuit and destroyed his sense of their direction. He couldn't tell if they were behind him, in front of him, or all around him. Four voices? Five? More? His lungs burned.

He skidded into a quiet street and for a paralyzing moment thought he'd come out too far north. Then he caught sight of a familiar awning and took off east.

She was parked three streets over, in the last street space on the block. He'd cruised a quarter of a mile for that spot. Nothing sucked worse than making it back to your getaway vehicle with some sort of hellspawn bearing down on you only to find it blocked in with a Volkswagon parked too close in front and a Miata pulled up too close in back. He was pulling away from the curb before the door had fully shut.

His first thought was to drive sedately and try to blend in. That went to shit when a siren whooped behind him the moment he turned onto the first cross street, so he floored it up the boulevard and ran a red light to turn west. The squad car followed.

"Is this a car chase? Am I in a goddamned car chase?"

Merely having Baby's seat at his back made his brain work better. The foot chase had been a near thing, and it would have gone very differently without the lucky dumpster and the delay from the finest tripping over each other. As it was, his right arm was nearly useless now. But even winged, driving was his element. All the geography that he hadn't been able to remember while he was running came back to him once he was burning rubber. He didn't know the town as well as the cops who lived here, but their cars couldn't do what his could.

He had to make it back to the motel. He couldn't lose Sam's things. If he managed to lose his pursuit far enough away from the place, say on this side of Route 6, then he could rest there, regroup, look at the map and find a place to go to ground.

Then what? Turn the town inside-out looking for answers and hope he didn't wind up in super-max a hundred miles from his brother?

A cop car appeared in front of him, lights going apeshit. Dean cut a hard left in front of a box truck and heard a screech as the cruiser behind him T-boned it trying to follow. The one that had been approaching him banked into the turn at speed and stayed with him.

"Why am I in a car chase, how am I in a car chase, what the _goddamned hell_ am I doing in a fucking _car chase_ —"

Providence consisted of vaguely gridlike patches crazy-quilted together into a mixed-use sprawl. This section was residential. A minivan started to back out int the twenty-five mile-an-hour zone where Dean was doing forty-five, hit its brakes, and scooted back in. A block and a half behind him, the patrol unit ran a stop sign.

What he needed was enough space to make a plausible feint. The motel was due south from Dorner's apartment, and he'd fled north and west, away from the city center and its higher concentration of police. To make it, he had to cross about a mile of tight-meshed intersections and a major highway.

Adrenaline mostly overrode pain, for now, but that wouldn't last forever, and sooner or later driving one-handed would slow him down. Sooner or later a lot of things would pile up on him. The only way to win a car chase was to keep it short.

He turned left onto—whatever the hell street it was, he just knew it ran south. He needed to make them think he was headed out of town, which right now meant making them think he was headed for Route 6 or Route 10. And he had to get out of this residential maze before the Providence PD got their shit together enough to coordinate an interception at one of the hundreds of intersections in here.

He turned eastward onto the broader Atwells Avenue. Traffic was light in his direction, heavier in the other: rush hour went on for a long time in a city this size, and the citizenry were still migrating from downtown to suburbs. Good.

Vehicles scrambled to pull over out of the way of the lights and siren. The squad car was about eight seconds behind him. He could improve that, now he was on a bigger artery. Once he had some slack, he'd just need an opportunity to use it.

He fucking hated this town. It was pointless and it couldn't decide whether it was city or suburbia and the buildings were ugly. It was too close to the bay and too far from the ocean and what even was the point of Rhode Island?

He needed a place to hide the car. Just for a minute, even. But a sleek, solid black car like this one wasn't exactly inconspicuous.

Behind him, a dark sedan appeared just behind the squad car. It wasn't running flashers and it was hanging back, but Dean had spent enough time running from police to be able to tell it was here for him. Probably Gutierrez and her partner, since this—whatever the hell it was—was clearly her operation. He gritted his teeth. At least he knew where she was, now.

A lumbering bus turned east into his lane from the south. Already going too fast to stop, Dean saw it happen a second and a half before he entered the intersection on a red light. He swung left into the westbound turn lane, floored it, and cleared the bus about two feet before the turn lane gave out.

When next he checked his mirrors, the bus was frantically trying to pull into a gas station parking lot, stopping and starting with both pursuit cars stuck behind it. He turned south.

The building density abruptly dropped off in the approach to the US-10/US-6 junction. As he passed an abandoned barber shop, Dean saw two things: signs for the ramp to RI-10 and a business with a parking lot that was empty except for a few long, black cars. He blinked. It was a funeral home.

He slammed on the brakes, wrenched the wheel to the right through a spike of agony, and brought the Impala to a halt between two hearses. He cut the engine.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve—

The patrol car went wailing by. The unmarked car followed right behind. Ducked down and looking through the side windows of one of the hearses beside him, Dean saw one take the on-ramp for RI-10 north, the other for RI-10 south.

Five seconds went by, then ten, then twenty, then thirty.

"Well, I'll be damned."

He gave it another thirty seconds before he turned the car back on. Then he pulled out from the funeral home's parking lot with more control than he'd pulled in—one of their hearses had a long gouge down the side from Baby's passenger side mirror now; he actually felt kind of bad about that—eased the Impala back onto the road, and crossed underneath RI-10 via a quiet underpass a few yards past the on-ramps.

He drove the rest of the way to the motel as sedately as a soccer mom who'd just topped off her Xanax, checking his mirrors, sandwiching himself between less conspicuous vehicles where he could. Upon arrival, he saw nothing more sinister waiting for him than a minivan with a "Baby on Board" sign pulled up to the neighboring room. Of course, he hadn't noticed anything sinister when he'd been breaking into Jacob Dorner's apartment, but he was paying attention, now, and he could remember the clump of people hanging awkwardly around in front of the coffee shop, the almost ludicrously unconvincing (except that he'd been convinced) guy leaning against the front window of the bodega half a block down from it. The signs had been right there: POLICE SURVEILLANCE in giant, neon letters. And he'd walked right into it.

Sirens wailed somewhere far off, probably on the expressway they assumed he was on. He cursed when he fumbled the door key with his shaking left hand. Finally he got the fucking thing open.

First off he slapped on the police scanner. Then he started throwing things into bags one-handed.

"—southbound on 10, not seeing anything. Munoz, you got a visual?"

"Negative, Tony. Stopped a black sedan that was behaving erratically on the northbound 95, but it was just a 502—"

Gutierrez's voice cut into the chatter, incredulous. "You pulled over the wrong vehicle?"

Despite himself, Dean grinned. If he'd been unprepared for an action like theirs, at least they were even less prepared for a fugitive like him.

Sam's belongings were the first he swept into the bag: clothes, weapons, mp3 player, journal, Rufus's address book. He zipped it closed one-handed and dumped it by the door. His shoulder was dislocated; he wasn't entirely sure what the fuck he was going do about that. Hospitals were definitely out. Without Sam here, that didn't leave a lot of options. He ignored the panic tightening its grip with each minute that passed.

He'd load up the car, change the plates, then take thirty minutes to rest. He'd be able to think more clearly after thirty minutes of rest.

"District 2 Adam 38."

Clear tone. "38."

"You closing on location?"

It occurred to Dean suddenly that the siren sounds he'd heard on arrival were not retreating.

"ETA two minutes."

"District 4 Adam 20 to dispatch, what's the address?"

Dean froze.

"Adam 20, it's 13 Gorham Ave, offa Huntington."

The motel's address.

Dean swore fluently and started raking as many of the papers stuck to the wall into his open duffel as he could. Shit, shit, _shit—_

"20 to dispatch, 10-4. Can be there in three minutes or under. Just in case he's circled back, or somethin'."

"Dispatch to Adam 38. Wait for District 4 car. Suspect armed and dangerous."

He slung both his bag and Sam's over his functioning shoulder, held the scanner by its antenna between his teeth, and slammed out of the room. The scanner crackled in his ear about how the units en route to the motel were to secure the location and wait, that a warrant was forthcoming. He didn't waste time trying to remember how much he'd left taped up on the wall or how bad it would look.

Tossing the bags in the car twisted his shoulder in a way that had him retching on the pavement for precious seconds. Where the hell was Sam? Where was his brother to give him a girly back rub, and fix his shoulder, and carry some of this shit, and pull the plug on this nightmare?

Eyes watering, he peeled out of the motel as fast as he dared and picked any direction that was away.

The sirens were definitely louder now. They'd found him awfully easily, flashy car chase notwithstanding. Jesus, had the woman had him _followed?_ Had he _missed_ being followed?

Gutierrez came back on the radio. "Q11 here. Suspect is a white male, six-two, six-three, hundred and eighty pounds, thirty-five to forty years of age—"

"Forty? Screw you!" he snarled.

What the hell did they even suspect him of, other than impersonating an officer? Because a little collegial fraud was not enough to explain this.

Dean focused on the immediate physical objective of making it out of this and didn't let himself think about what making it out meant. There was no choice. Not hunted and crippled and out of ideas.

_Sammy, I fucking need you here._

"All units, Q11." Gutierrez's voice again. "Fugitive is a person of interest in Lola. Repeat, person of interest in Lola, suspected accomplice. I don't care if you have to cork this town tighter than a tax man's asshole and toss every building one by one, I want this son of a bitch. All units respond. I want roadblocks at all major junctions as well as 246 and Branch Ave, 7 and 15, 128 and Greenville, 14 and 5, 12 and 5, everything crossing over the beltway—"

"Don't ask for much, do you?" someone smart-assed without IDing themselves.

_"Make it happen."_

Dean set his jaw and saw the road map in his mind. He'd spent hours staring at it; it had to pay off now. West was his best shot. North meant too much congestion, and to the east and south he'd run out of land too fast to maneuver. And Gutierrez, or her superiors, knew it; the response she'd just ordered would close every remotely simple route of this town.

Route 14 West was his first thought. Good throughput, good latitude, not too far from his present location. Then he remembered that it had a bridge, going over the Scituate Reservoir. Bridges were always best avoided when evading the law.

Route 12, then. He remembered a line joining the two parallel roads almost vertically, just beyond the fat rope of the Providence Beltway. He remembered it because it had some Hobbit name, what was it, Bilbo, Frodo, Merry— _Pippin_. He'd take Route 14 west to Pippin Orchard Boulevard, drop down to Route 12, skirt the reservoir to the south, and rejoin Route 14 to cross over into Bumfuck, Connecticut.

He'd be five hundred miles away before dawn.

_Sam._

Roadblocks were going up on both of those routes. But the ones he couldn't go around were outside the Providence city limits. They had to coordinate with the state, coordinate with the departments in Johnston and Cranston, and physically get units in position, and Dean was already halfway there.

Strategy was moot, now. This was a simple race.

_Sam, Sam, Sam._

His shoulder screamed every time he made a hard turn. But he wasn't in a car chase, anymore; he had to beat the roadblocks without being noticed or it was all over. He couldn't pass the puttering mid-century truck on Alto. He didn't dare do more than thirty-five on Silver Lake. He sat, jaw locked, through red lights.

"—Where's Lincoln 83?"

"She's on a 23109."

"Pull her."

Route 14. He slowed but did not stop at the stop sign and turned onto the westbound vein. Then he accelerated.

Thirty-five. Forty. Forty-five—definitely suburbia, now, squat clapboard houses and impatient SUVs. Junction with Route 5 in three tenths of a mile.

His pulse spiked as he approached the intersection. A red light was waiting for him, two cars in line. No wash of pink and blue strobe lights, but that could change any second. Speed up or slow down?

Just as his foot hesitated over the accelerator, the light changed to green. He hit the brakes, slowed to a mannerly car-length behind the Volvo just starting to move, and proceeded through the intersection normally.

One down, one to go.

The lead car turned off at a residence half a mile on, fucking stopping in the middle of the road to do it, taking his sweet fucking time to turn around and back in and Dean swung the Impala around it and the Volvo halfway through the maneuver, riding up on the sidewalk and hitting the gas again. Up ahead, the speed limit ticked up to forty-five.

Signs for I-295 flared blue in his headlights as he pushed Baby through a yellow light. Ancient pizzerias, abandoned garden supply businesses, huge, apple-pie front lawns. A hundred little shifts to underscore how far away he already was from downtown Providence. He'd have heard something if they were already in position, right? The scanner crackled. Maybe not. This far out, the Providence chatter was fuzzy and Sam wasn't there to adjust the settings. Sirens were just becoming audible, Dopplering towards him from somewhere north at freeway speeds. He edged the needle up closer to fifty. The sidewalks were broad, here. One way or another, he was going through.

In the end, it was an anticlimax. He passed the junction at five over the speed limit through an unbroken green light. The sirens faded behind him.

He kept a death grip on the wheel as he cut south to RI-12 and continued west, but there was no pursuit. A sheriff's department vehicle passed him in the opposite lane as he left Cranston, but he was right behind a Mack truck and the cruiser showed no flicker of interest. No one at all appeared to prevent him from leaving Providence.

His right hand shook uncontrollably as he reached for his phone. He tried to dial, dropped it, tried again. His whole body was shaking, actually.

_"This is Robert Singer—"_

"Damn it!"

Empty fields and trees stretched out to either side in the dark. The road contracted, the speed limit expanded. Soon he'd rejoin RI-14, and soon after that cross into rural Connecticut. The occasional oncoming car illuminated the Impala's interior, and his heart was beating wildly, faster than it had as he'd borne down on the roadblock sites.

_SamSamSamSam—_

"Cas, _please!"_ he cried out. "Fucking _please!"_

Another truck passed and it was dark again.

He finally got onto US-6 in the dark, sleeping town of Brooklyn, Connecticut and skirted north around Poughkeepsie via minor roads. Just past the Catskills, he stopped for gas. One other car was gassing up under the fluorescent-lit canopy; one of the young girls waiting for their tank to fill glanced up, made eye-contact with him briefly, and blanched with an emotion he didn't care enough to read. Horror, maybe. Or pity.

He carried on west. He had no specific strategy beyond avoiding major population centers. He had no specific idea of where he was, after a while. The need to sleep gnawed at the back of his mind, but he pushed on past the bend of the Appalachian Mountains.

He stayed on Route 6 for quite some time, hours, maybe. The odometer showed something over six hundred miles from Providence. He stopped for gas again, and a mile afterward saw signs for lodging. He turned in at the motel another three miles on.

Dean got a room without registering the name of the place or the rates and parked down where the clerk indicated. Limbs curiously heavy, his shoulder by now a steady, almost deadened ache, he brought their duffels in from the car.

He put the bags down on the bed farthest from the door without turning on the light. He sat down on the other, curled on his side with his shoes on, and at some point, wept bitterly.


	6. the happiest days of our lives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Sam thought about what he'd seen of the ghost. Even now, his stomach turned a bit. "Ghosts are like an echo. They get distorted by whatever's keeping them here, but their apparitions are clues to what happened to them."_
> 
> _"Please," said Jacob. "Enlighten us. What exactly happened to_ that?" __
> 
> _"I have no idea," Sam whispered. ___

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're enjoying this yarn, or if you have other comments, please consider feeding the author. :)

Only a lifetime of experience and the chill in the air told Sam what he was seeing was a ghost at all.

Spilling down the wall was a lumpy slide of pallor and corruption. It hadn't been there a moment ago. He might have thought it was more ecto, except that it was too thick and, barely, too solid. Too still. It could not be termed a figure. It looked like someone had slopped fat and hairs from a drain and colorless flesh down a wall. Nothing obviously human or even animal stood out about it, except that it was breathing.

Sam wasn't.

His mind blanked utterly of anything but the knowledge that he had nothing. No weapon, no tool, no shelter. If it came, he couldn't even run.

At first, the spirit's breathing was only visible, and only barely. Then it became audible; then it became louder; and then the dark mat at the top lifted and Sam realized that it was its head. The breath-sounds hitched. The malformed head-knob half-lifted again, fell again. It bobbed a couple more times, and ribbons of matter spread over the wall quivered.

Sam was just beginning to wonder how a thing that had no feet or even visible skeleton would move when the entire pile seemed to sigh and began to slip sideways along the wall, towards him.

He shrank back into the corner. The ghost followed. Sam darted forward and away from Jacob and Lindsey, keeping unconsciously close to the wall and the light it afforded. The thing hanging down the wall paused, then reversed direction and slid slowly over the wall and after him.

The ecto was glowing brighter, but it was still damned dark in here and Sam couldn't see the thing clearly. When its mass parted over the leaky pipe that had woken him early, he was glad.

Sam stopped about halfway down the platform and swallowed, waiting to see what would happen. The others were saying something, he was pretty sure, but he couldn't really hear them past the pressure on his ear drums. The ghost stopped when it drew level with him.

After a moment, when all it did was sit there, Sam found himself taking a step towards it. He stared at it. The head-knob thing hung down so the face wasn't visible. At least, he thought it was the head. It seemed to be, from the mat of what he hoped was hair, except that the shape was wrong and he knew, with sickening certainty, that it wasn't really big enough. It jerked once.

He stumbled when he retreated. It was such a civilian thing to do, but he couldn't take his eyes off the thing and, truly, it didn't even _matter_ —graceful or graceless, he had nowhere to go. So he stayed where he fell, staring at the spirit, as fascinated as he was repelled.

Then it climbed down off the wall.

Or slid down off the wall. Sam didn't even know how to parse the movement, or the trail of not-there mucus it left behind. It moved in fits and starts along the floor, a living carpet of lumps and knobs that wasn't even thick enough to be a body, what the _hell_ was this thing, and his heart hammered as he scrambled backwards on his ass and elbows.

Ghost-flicker broke up the thing's long, slow crawl towards him. Christ, it was cold, and Sam became aware that his limbs were growing clumsy again and that his thoughts were slowing with them, and then his hands found the end of the platform. There was nowhere left to go.

It was at his feet now. The head-knob moved restlessly, flickering. One moment he thought maybe it had arm-stumps; the next it was an incoherent pile of meat. It picked up its head. Where a face should have been, there was only void that had necrosed away down to the back of a skull.

It began to climb him.

The sensation was much the same as any other spirit attack, at first, except that where spirits usually reached for the heart or lungs or throat, this one seemed to pour itself into _all_ of him. Despite knowing there was nowhere left to go, Sam instinctively tried to move away. It didn't matter. All that came out of his limbs was a short convulsion.

He saw the twisting mass of the spirit ripple up and over his face. Cold paralyzed him everywhere from his toes to the root of his tongue. Then it pressed into his head.

Panic so involuntary that it didn't even seem like his edged up his throat. Blinding pain began to build as he fought the intrusion, a slow, passionless, single-minded pressure as inexorable as water through a clogged pipe. Sam flashed on an image of what water eventually did to all cracks, and then it was through.

* * *

Sam walked backwards. Sun was warm on his face, gold dappled with green until he was back out on a street, cars going by the wrong way around him.

_Slip._

"Brendan Whitmore was not what you'd call an overachiever. His sister's cute, though. You?"

"Bupkis."

_Slip._

A priest was looking at him, shock and recognition in his eyes. Sam took hold of his head by the hair and drove his face into the concrete step where it was already obliterated into red pulp and a spreading stain. Then again, and the stain was smaller. Then again, and again, and again, until it was whole again—

"Well, come in, then," the priest said, and climbed the unmarked steps.

The Other lost interest. _Slip._

Sam lay on his side, listening in the darkness, while Dean breathed too quietly in the next bed. He was close enough Sam could reach out and touch him.

Dean—he'd done something to Dean—he remembered the curiosity, and then he felt the curiosity, and then something felt the curiosity for him, and he saw Dean, Dean arching off the floor, in the dark, in the dirt, with needles in his mouth and his eyes full of blood, and was it him tingling with excitement, or something else?

Someone pressed at him. Pressed, and pressed, and pressed, but _No, this isn't how I'm going to find out—_

"Maybe we should just burn the place."

"Yeah, or maybe not, Dean, because who knows what Rufus even has in here," Sam said, absorbed in shelves, taking books, taking talismans, taking a thick volume bound in brown leather from a desk drawer. It was none of his business, but he was curious and besides—

_Slip._ "Believe me when I tell you that the things you don't know? Could kill you."

"I feel like I got slipped the worst mickey of all time and woke up to find out I burned the whole city down."

"It wasn't you."

_You're lying._

There was someone in here with him. "Who are you?"

They didn't answer. He couldn't see them, couldn't hear them. He could only feel their fingers in his brain, prying apart the folds and looking for something. If he could just separate them from himself, then maybe he could wrench them out, but they threaded themselves through every movement like fat in a muscle.

The cop's head whipped back under his fist. Sam followed him down to the ground. The blows were all huge, with plenty of wasted motion, really the efficient thing would have been just to snap the man's neck, but he wasn't any kind of physical threat and Sam was restless, bored, and it felt good to hit the body beneath him again and again and again.

_Slip._

Sam was in Jacob Dorner's apartment. He wanted to stay in that memory, there was something important in it, but someone else was controlling his body and it slipped away in a blur until he was in a church crypt instead, examining the delicate, parsley-like leaves under his fingers. _Artemisia vulgaris_ , his mind obediently supplied, but this wasn't what the Other was looking for, and he just had time to think _Wrong kind of wormwood_ before a surge of someone else's frustration carried him out of that memory, too.

He tumbled. Memories rose up, were angrily struck down, were slit open and pried into and Sam walked backwards along a street in Providence. He passed docks, flashing oar blades. Sunlight warmed his shoulders through his suit jacket. He passed buses, doughnut shops, graven letters that spelled _In Deo Speramus_.

But Sam didn't. He had all his life, right up to the moment he'd jumped, even as he'd fallen—but then he'd woken up in the panic room, mind a neatly plastered blank for everything after dead graveyard grass and Dean's ruined face and one moment of perfect peace, and found that he just didn't.

He felt the Other more obtrusively now. It tried to wrench him backwards from the lip of the pit and to the hot metal of the car through jeans as he held Dean down over the hood and drew back his fist, to the moment when he and Lucifer were neither two nor one and time splintered into a thousand different rays but that wasn't what made the Other grip him and try to delve deep and intimate, like it deserved to see this, like it had any right.

Anger boiled up in Sam like storm surge. There had been a time when it had been at his command, before he'd realized how much he was at its. They'd done great things together.

Sam took hold of the probing fire in his mind and wrenched.

* * *

Inhuman screams rent the air. Human screams did, too.

Sam lay gasping on the concrete, his head hanging off the end of the platform, neck strained, looking into darkness and the dim outline of the far wall. He managed to turn onto his side and then up onto his knees, and what he saw was the ghost-thing twisting on the floor, retreating, and the ecto _burning_ where it poured from the walls, throbbing bright orange.

Sound filled the chamber. The ghost was screaming. Marian was screaming with the ghost. Jacob was screaming about how he wasn't going to get skull-fucked again, let it just try, and Lindsey was screaming at Jacob to shut up. Sam watched the spirit move in ripples and jerks until it found the wall. Then it flickered, squelched, and folded itself away into some other dimension.

Wishing he could afford to throw up again, Sam squeezed his eyes shut against a blinding headache that he didn't want to admit was familiar. Marian's cries died down to moans. He staggered to his feet and away from the edge of the platform.

"What—the hell—was that?" he panted.

Lindsey and Jacob's shouting match cut out. "Sam? Is that you?"

He dropped heavily into the corner between Jacob's pipe and Marian and Lindsey's. He swallowed. His mouth was very dry. "I think so."

"Where is it?" Jacob sounded on the brink of hysteria. "Where'd it go?"

"Think it left," Sam croaked. "For now." His pulse was still racing from the surge rage. It ticked down in his neck like a cooling engine. The sensation was not novel. It always used to feel like this, after he—

"What do you mean, _it left_?" Lindsey's voice was hard. "Why did it leave?"

"It—" Sam raked a shaking hand through his hair. The roots were greasy. God, he wanted a shower. All he wanted was a shower and Dean. He laughed ruefully. "You were right, after all. It came to visit me."

"And then it just left?"

He took a moment before answering her, trying to sift through the experience. "It was in my head." He remembered—shit. That memory from Bristol, again, of beating the cop half to death and enjoying it. Conversations with Dean. Irrelevant strolls through Providence, like something was rewinding his life in his head. Something—something he had done to Dean, didn't know whether he wanted more to remember or to forget—

He remembered meeting Father Reynolds in a confused jumble. He'd passed the church from that old case on the way to Jacob's apartment. That much he was reasonably certain had really happened. But the rest— Oh, God. Had he really killed him? That couldn't be real, couldn't be. What about the rest, then? Had the old priest recognized him at all? Spoke to him? Had he imagined the entire encounter?

The whole day was hazy in his memory. The only time he'd been able to see anything clearly was when the ghost was looking at it through him.

Lindsey was calling his name, sounding pretty pissed off about it. "What?"

"I said, _and then what?"_

"I threw it out. What the hell was that? Ghost possession I've felt before, and this was nothing like that."

"What in the hell do you mean, you threw it out? How?"

Sam blinked at the mounting fury in her voice. "I don't know. I just did. It wasn't easy." He didn't feel like touching on his resume of special talents.

"He's lying," said Jacob.

"What? Why would I?" Oh, Jesus, was this going to be a psychic dick-measuring thing?

"No one else has ever done that before," Lindsey said. "How did you?"

"I told you, I don't know. I just— It was trying to look at something, a memory, that I didn't want it to see, and I got angry and forced it out."

"Right." Her voice was clipped. "Or you've been in league with it this whole time."

"Did you really just say 'in league with it'?"

"He's lying," Jacob said again. "It left to go grab someone else or something. No one could do that."

"You said you're the Ghostbusters, but I don't see any rescue coming. What are you really doing here, Sam?"

Sam counted to ten. It wasn't her fault; the stress of being trapped for months on end had to cause untold psychological damage, to say nothing of regularly repeated spirit possession. Even the most well adjusted person on the planet would be paranoid by now. Or maybe she had just been a fucking asshole to begin with, who knew. "Exactly what I told you, Lindsey. Believe me or not, I can't force you."

She was right about one thing: there was no sign of Dean. That could just mean he hadn't found them yet. It probably meant that. Sam hoped it meant that, and he refused to think about the possibility that Dean had already found the ghost and been no better prepared for it than Sam had, only for it to decide that Hotel California had no vacancies.

He licked his lips and thought suddenly, vividly, of the leaky pipe, and he knew it was time. Clean or not, he had to have water.

The ecto was still glowing brightly enough that he didn't have to grope along the wall; he could see the pipe and the puddle of his vomit beyond it. A cockroach scuttled away from the latter as he approached.

"Sam? Sam?"

He squatted before the pipe, counting. Drops of water welled from the rounded tip of the concrete filling at a rate of about once every two seconds. It would have to do. Awkwardly, ignoring Lindsey's calls, he maneuvered himself until his head was under the pipe and opened his mouth.

He felt like a hamster. The spirit's attack had been invasive, but this was degrading. Sam shut his eyes and thought about making it out of here to see Dean again.

It tasted alright, at least. It was hard to tell, because the whole sewer was so putrid, and his sense of smell had long since exceeded what it could process and given up—ha—the ghost, but it was possible that the materials choking his water supply were also filtering it. It didn't much matter, at this point. He had to drink.

"He pass out again?"—Jacob talking to Lindsey.

"The hell should I know?"—Lindsey replying.

"No way he forced it out. You said he fainted when it just came to visit me, never mind him."

Lindsey snorted. "Yeah, and you've been Superman up to now."

Sam swallowed one mouthful, two, three. Then he let some water fall in his cupped hands and washed them as best he could. He returned to the corner by the others.

"If anyone's in league with it, it's you, you bitch," Jacob threw back. "You've been alive down here how long? And you really expect me to believe you've been living off that goop on the walls?"

Sam had questions about that, himself, but they could wait. "You were right," he said before Lindsey could reply. "It's looking for something. What is it looking for?"

"Thought you were the expert."

"Expert?" Jacob asked suspiciously. "Expert in what?"

"Well, you see, Jake, while you were getting reamed by Casper—"

Sam's head throbbed. "Supernatural phenomena. If you've had nightmares about it, it's real. Except Bigfoot and Donald Trump's hair. We're called hunters. My brother and I came here because people have been disappearing mysteriously in Providence since at least 1963, almost twenty that I know of. There's something connecting all of you."

"You say that like you're so sure," Lindsey spat. "An hour ago you were sure it wouldn't come for you."

"I'm sorry, I'm still hung up on _supernatural expert_ ," Jacob said.

"Yeah, you would be," Sam muttered.

"How do you know we're connected?" Lindsey asked again. "The last thing I can remember from before is leaving the nursing home for lunch. Jacob said he was running or something. And he's not even from here. Then there's you, and all I know about you is that you're nuts."

"Even if it's decided to try to use me, I don't think I'm part of the pattern. I was just in the wrong place."

"What place was that?"

"I can't _remember,_ and that's bugging the hell out of me. I'm pretty sure I'd just come out of Jacob's apartment—"

"You broke into my apartment?"

"—but everything around when it took me is just really fuzzy. It's like it fried my brain when it took me. Sounds like it did that to all of us." Mutters of agreement. "Look, I'm not saying you did anything to make it take you. But it chose you for a reason."

"Yeah. Because it's insane."

"Probably. That doesn't mean it doesn't have a reason. It might not be a reason that would make sense to anyone else, but there'll be one somewhere. Spirits—they get confused. It's like they get so hung up on one idea that they become blind to anything else." Cramps were starting to pinch at his stomach, though they were mild for now. "And this one… whatever else it is, it's motivated."

"Why does he keep talking about it like it's a person?" Jacob asked Lindsey.

"Because he thinks it's a dead one."

"There was nothing human about that," Jacob said flatly.

Sam thought about what he'd seen of the ghost. Even now, his stomach turned a bit. "Ghosts are like an echo. They get distorted by whatever's keeping them here, but their apparitions are clues to what happened to them."

"Please," said Jacob. "Enlighten us. What exactly happened to _that?"_

"I have no idea," Sam whispered.

* * *

They all slept for a while. At least, Sam tried. He thought he understood why Litner had chosen to die on the stairs, now, if that had been a choice: it was hard to close your eyes anywhere near the wall when you knew the spirit appeared from there, but to just curl up in the middle of the floor went against instinct at a base, animal level. It was cold, and it was exposed. And the ghost, when it came, would find him there just as surely.

Sam knew he needed to sleep and that now, just after a visitation, was the best time to do it. They should be safe for a few hours, if he hadn't pissed it off too much. But ultimately, what pulled him under was rock-bottom blood sugar and the fact that there was nothing else to do.

He woke… who knew when, really? That was the bastard of it. He'd read the studies, seen a few victims, and knew, in a broad, intellectual way, what the absence of any meaningful time markers could do to a human being, psychologically. But that didn't prepare him for the fact that it was starting to affect him already.

What maybe bothered him most was this itch at the back of his brain, like this was actually familiar.

He'd gone to sleep propped up in the corner where he talked to the others. That, too, was probably down to animal instinct: sleep near the herd. He wondered if Lindsey and Marian slept together, not for anything sexual, but for warmth. They probably did. It might have been partly how they'd survived for so long.

Sam grunted when he stretched out his legs. His right knee didn't pop anymore, he'd noticed.

A rustling sound filtered through the grate at his left. "Sam?" It was very low, almost a whisper. Sam felt absurdly like he was talking covertly with a classmate at preschool naptime. "That you?"

"Yeah. S' me."

They breathed in the quiet for a few minutes. "Sorry I bugged out on you earlier." Jacob's voice was hollow. "Been sort of a stressful couple of days."

Sam sat, staring into at the dark. "Yeah."

"Did you really throw it out?"

"Yeah."

Dorner's voice was almost plaintive. "How?"

Sam swallowed. "It's easier when you've had some practice."

"What do you—?"

"Never mind. Just… not my first rodeo, okay. We'll get through this." What he did not say, and did not particularly want to dwell on, was that he wasn't sure he'd be able to eject the ghost more than once. And its interest in his memories could pose difficulties for him that it did not for the others.

_Don't scratch the wall._

"We should talk, all of us." They should, urgently, but Sam felt bone-tired, and in this momentary hush, he couldn't bring himself to mount another attempt at a rally. "Compare notes and try to understand what it wants."

"Will that change anything?"

Sam exhaled. "Depends on what it wants."

"What was it like, for you?"

Absently Sam picked at the crud under his fingernails. "A lot like you and Lindsey described. It was reviewing my memories. I could get a read on it, sometimes, but just broad strokes: anger, frustration. Interest. Definitely more interest in some memories than others."

"Yeah? Like what?"

_The ones where I didn't have a soul. The ones where I dangled my brother like meat on a hook. That one time when I was kind of Satan._

"Violent ones," he settled on, finally. "You?"

Dorner seemed to have thought about this since they'd last discussed it. "Everyday stuff, mainly. Lindsey talked about it walking around in her, and that's mainly what it did."

Sam wondered if Jacob's answer was any more truthful than his own. He hoped so. They couldn't all have had a turn being possessed by the Devil in here, could they?

Instead of pressing, he settled for talking. "Mostly it was like it was flipping through channels, but sometimes, with enough effort, I could take back the remote. It got pissed off when I did that, but I think it pissed it off more when it didn't find whatever it was looking for. It's like… It's like it expects us to know something."

"Yeah, but _what?_ I dreamt a lot of memories, but it was mostly just stupid stuff: walking around town, jogging, going to the gym, being in my apartment. Why dig through our memories, anyway? If it wants to find something, why not just go out there and look?"

"Been thinking about that. I think it's bound to the sewers. I'm not sure how—most spirits are actually a lot more geographically limited than that. But it explains how it could take all of us from all over the city. We either wandered too close to a sewer opening or it lured us there."

"Lured us? Like mind control?"

"Yeah. That's, um. That's a thing for a lot of spirits. Sorry."

Silence for a few.

"So, ghosts."

"Yup."

"Like. Lots of them?"

Sam laughed quietly. "More than you'd think, yeah."

"What makes them come back?"

"Honestly? Nobody's really sure." Sam shifted, trying to get comfortable on the concrete. "It's not so much that they come back as that they never really go. So, if they stick around, it's because they have some kind of unfinished business. Violent death is the most common kind. Murdered, and the killer got away with it." He stared at a scab on his knee in the silence. _Plink._ "Based on what I saw, something like that's a pretty good guess for this one."

Little as he liked to, he tried to remember exactly how it had looked. Gender, age, species had been obliterated in what conception it had left of itself. It wasn't a figure, it was a pile. If the apparition was any record of what physically had happened to his or her body, then they had been taken apart. More than once. "Something bad happened to this ghost, man."

"Yeah, but—" Dorner sounded uncomfortable. "People get murdered every day. I mean, Providence has something like twenty every year. They can't _all_ be coming back from the dead, can they?"

"They aren't. Like I said, nobody really knows why some people stay when some people don't, but it's a choice they make, not to move on. Anger's the most common reason, but sometimes it's something else. Sometimes it even starts as something good. Like a desire to protect someone."

He hadn't thought about that night in the old Lawrence house in months. No—years. There was an extra year between now and the trip Cas had sent them on into the past that he didn't have, and even now that kept tripping him up.

She'd been so beautiful. It was functionally the first time he'd ever met her. For months afterward, remembering the way she'd looked at him could fuel enough anger to swing a machete through a vampire's trunk.

_Sam, I'm sorry._

"Sam? Sam!"

"Yeah, um. Sorry." He wiped a hand down his face, then wished he hadn't. "Spaced out. Jacob, have you eaten anything yet?"

Long pause to that. "No. Not— No."

"I think… I think we're gonna have to."

"You said your buddy was going to come and get us out of here. _You said."_

"He will, Jacob, but he has to find us first. He won't stop looking, no matter what." _So long as he's alive._ "But look, I was looking for you guys when I was taken, and to be honest? I wasn't close to finding you." He glossed over the part where they'd been about to pack up and leave with the job undone. "Dean will come, but it won't matter if we're dead."

The head rush when he stood nearly put him back on the floor, but he fought it off until his vision cleared. He wouldn't let his brother come here in vain.

"Wondered when you'd get hungry enough." Lindsey's voice was rough with sleep.

Sam looked at the biggest spill of ecto on the wall. "'Hungry' isn't necessarily the word I'd use."

"You're lying," Dorner said. "You have to be. No way you've been alive down here this long on—on whatever _that_ is. It's feeding you."

Drowsy amusement colored her answer. "Roaches aren't as bad as you'd think. They all seem to come up here, too. Told you our room was the best."

Cockroaches. Okay, that wasn't so bad. Better than the prospect of the ecto, in a lot of ways; he and Dean had done their share of experimentation with grubs and beetles in their days of basic survival training. Ah, boyhood.

"I've— Look, I've _eaten_ those, alright?" Jacob burst out. "You happy? I ate the fucking roaches. But there aren't enough of them."

"Yeah, well, maybe people don't live very long in your room."

"Enough, Lindsey," Sam said. "Look, clearly there's enough calories around to at least keep us going. If you're short, I'll… bring you some of whatever's available in here."

He'd just volunteered to bring somebody dead insects as presents, like some kind of deranged house cat. Great.

"Is there anything else, Lindsey?"

"We never seem to run out of rats. The corpses are a draw, I think."

Well. _That_ he truly wasn't hungry enough for.

"I haven't seen any," said Jacob. Sam had a sudden picture of himself stuffing dead rats through the grate to Dorner's pipe. Jesus. He really was turning into a house cat. Part hamster, part Dory, part _actual fucking house cat._

He thought of Dean. Whatever it took.

"One thing at a time," he said. "Rats and roaches could carry just about anything, but I guess the ecto should be clean. About as clean as anything in here, anyway."

"I'm not eating that," Jacob said.

"You've been down here two days longer than I have and you've eaten a handful of insects. Tell me you're not feeling it already." Dorner had no answer to that. "Look, it's simple: you'll get weaker. Then you'll get weaker. You'll fall asleep, slip into a coma, and die. Is that really what you want? To die down here, when there's finally someone looking for us who has a chance of solving this thing?"

Sam walked over to the biggest patch of ecto. It had dimmed, somewhat, since the ghost's departure, but it still glowed and oozed slightly. It covered an area maybe a foot wide and streamed all the way down to the floor, pooling in the join.

He simply could not believe that human beings put this in their mouths.

"We're trapped here, for now." It cost an effort to keep his voice clear and strong, like he wasn't having serious fucking misgivings about this. "If the one thing I can do to help my brother right now is stay alive, then that's what I'm going to do. Jacob, are you with me?"

One. Two. Three. Four. Then, grudging, uncertain: "Yeah. Fine, let's do this thing."

"Alright. Uh. Any particular recommendations here, Lindsey?"

"Nah." She was laughing, but had the decency to try to hide it. "I promise not to tell if you use the wrong fork."

Sam steeled himself, then he pressed his fingers into the thickest bubble of ecto. It was warmer than he'd expected, and the consistency as it came away from the wall was somewhere between rubber cement and slime mold. He swallowed his rising gorge.

"Eeurrrrghh _hhhhhhh,"_ said Jacob, long and heartfelt.

"Okay. We'll. We'll just, um. Get a good handful, here." Sam tried to get the flap of the stuff to part from the wall.

"This isn't, like. _Toxic,_ is it?"

"More toxic than starving?" Sam asked. They didn't have to know that the question was sincere.

"Whatever you're imagining it tastes like, it's worse," Lindsey put in helpfully.

"Alright. We'll do this together. Alright, Jacob?"

"Yeah. Sure."

"On the count of three. One. Two. Three."

She was right: it was worse than he had imagined.

"Oh, holy fuck, that's puke-worthy."

"Keep it down, Jacob," Sam said, eyes watering as he swallowed. "Otherwise we'll just have to eat more of it." Shuddering all over, he scooped up another helping.

After a few minutes, when his stomach was roiling but no longer digesting itself and the sounds of revulsion had tapered off from Jacob's direction, Sam decided enough was enough. It cost an effort, but he made himself lick his fingers clean.

"You boys all done?"

Sam sank down to hug his knees. He felt queasy, queasy and odd. Sort of… floaty. "Yeah. Yeah, I think so."

Lindsey's voice wafted down to them. "You are in for the trip of your _life."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: Dean has himself a road trip.


	7. we don't need no education

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean goes on a trip—the kind with roads—as part of a plan to find Sam. (It's not a very good plan.) Sam also goes on a trip. (It's the kind without roads.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's been a while. There are a few reasons for that, but I won't bore you with them. Thank you to everyone who's read and reviewed so far.
> 
> I made a tweak to chapter 5—added one word, pretty much—but it shouldn't be necessary to go back and hunt for it; I think this chapter provides everything you need. Now, whether anyone remembers anything that was going on after so long since this updated, that's another story. Sorry.

What sealed the deal was that when Dean flipped to the section at the back of Rufus's address book devoted to _Hunting accidents - medical care_ (as distinct from _Hunting accidents - public relations_ or _Hunting accidents - waste disposal_ ), he found _J C Canby_ cross-referenced yet again. His shoulder was still dislocated, and this Canby guy was a lot closer than Doc Robert. Next stop, West Virginia.

He could have called first, but he'd never cared much for forming first impressions over the phone. Before bringing a stranger on to help him find Sam, he needed to know they wouldn't be sold out or strung along. To that end, Dean wanted to look into the man's eyes, first. Or, at least, to look around his kitchen.

The trouble with location spells was that nearly of them were black magic. Implicit or explicit sale of your soul kind of shit. Winchesters put witches like that out of business, they didn't subsidize them. Of course, Canby could be anything from a civil engineer to a bookie, no sort of magical practitioner at all. But Dean thought not. Canby had managed to rile Rufus, and that required an extraordinary skill set.

And if Canby didn't pan out, well, Dean knew the exception to the rule about location spells.

Dean had awoken this morning in the moldiest motel room he'd ever occupied just outside of Burning Well, Pennsylvania. What woke him was the owner pounding on his door. The man had informed him that it was 11:35 and he'd have to charge Dean for an extra day. Dean had looked at the walls, frosted with mildew; then at the parking lot, empty but for his car, and shut the door in his face. Ten minutes later he'd paid in silence and left. There'd been no ice in the machine for his shoulder.

Signs advertised a hospital just a few miles west in the borough of Kane, PA, population 3,730. He almost went. Adrenaline and then exhaustion had gotten him through the previous night, but now there was nothing to distract him from what a dislocated shoulder really felt like. Four hours' sleep and immobility hadn't helped. In the end, though, having a genuine "hunting accident" to bring to Canby was his best in, so he'd gritted his teeth and had ibuprofen for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. The pain helped keep his mind off the distance growing between him and Providence.

Mount Storm, West Virginia (pop. 109) was a loose accretion of houses and trailers around the junction of Routes 50 and 42, folded deep into the Appalachians; Dean was unclear on whether it had any reason for existing other than the nearby power plant and the coal it burned. Canby's address was a few miles south. Dean drove for miles at a go under the silent sweep of wind turbines that loomed from each ridge without meeting another car. Traversing mountains had always made him obscurely uneasy. He could know exactly where he was and yet feel lost. He supposed it was something to do with the way the car moved over hills, rising and falling like a craft on some great, frozen ocean. Boats were not his scene. Plus, every respectable vampire story started with a long climb into the mountains.

As he drove, Dean considered his plan. It wasn't a good one. Even disregarding factors of time, it wasn't great. Dean wanted to find Sam. Dean hadn't been able to, so that meant he wanted someone else to find Sam. Except that most of the hunting community assumed that Sam was dead. Most of the rest wanted a word with him. Even if this Canby guy happened not to be one of them, there was nothing stopping him selling the information to someone who did.

When he turned in at 6 Plato Lane, there were no hoodoo signs, occult symbols, or overt signs of devil worship. What there was were cows. The Impala dipped and bounced as Dean crossed over a cattle grate, and the first thing he saw pass under his tires was a cow pat. Sheep and goats appeared, staring with slot-eyes and busy jaws, and from somewhere he could hear a rooster. He could neither hear nor see pigs, but it wasn't long before he could smell them. It began to look like Rufus's cryptic note about _Practical application (husbandry)_ had meant literal husbandry.

His shoulder was a steady bore of agony, and he felt every jolt as the car crawled up the rutted drive. Finally it ended before a tin-roofed, white clapboard house that backed into woods. The front yard was full of flowers and herbs, but they were laid out like a vegetable plot. As if they were arranged for access, not beauty. The back of his neck tingled. Witches had a use for husbandry, too.

Dean parked behind an ancient El Dorado and got out feeling kind of stupid. He had little more than a hunch to say that Canby was a player. But, Dean supposed, even if he wasn't, he might still be good for popping a shoulder back in. For damned sure he'd need that for plan B.

The screen door on the sagging porch creaked open. It discharged a slim man in corduroy and chambray, a cigarette burning between his fingers. For a long moment, he and Dean stood looking each other over. The man had silvery hair, but his skin, deeply tanned, was pulled smooth around his features in a way that made it hard to be sure of his age. Dean pegged him at Bobby's, give or take a decade. "Help you?" he asked.

"You Clovis Canby?"

"Was when I woke up this morning."

Dean indicated his makeshift sling with his good hand. "Heard from a friend that you're helpful with hunting accidents."

"Which friend was that?"

It wasn't like the truth could harm Rufus much. "Rufus Turner."

The man tapped his cigarette with his index finger. "Well, now, there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Told you I'm a doctor, did he?"

Dean knew he was being tested, but there wasn't much he could do about it. "More or less."

"Well, I'm not." Canby moved the cigarette to his mouth, took a drag, lowered it, and tapped it once again, almost daintily. When Dean hadn't moved by the end, he added, "But I used to be. Come on in."

Smoke hung in a visible layer inside in the slant of late afternoon sun. The living room looked ordinary, no rabbit carcases, no books bound in human skin, no occult garlands over the doors. Canby gestured Dean to the sofa as he himself settled in an old rocker; Dean cleared his throat and remained standing.

"How'd you put out your shoulder?"

"Hunting accident, like I said."

Canby looked him up and down. "Must've been a big deer."

"It was."

The man looked more amused than anything. He stubbed out his cigarette and placed it on a line of butts stacked in the ashtray like cordwood. Then he sat, waiting. Fumbling one-handed, Dean took out a few twenties. Canby looked at the bills, then back at him with a slightly pitying expression. Dean gritted his teeth and took out a few more.

Canby stood beside Dean and rolled up his sleeves. "I got one rule in my house, and I take it seriously: no swearing. Can you abide by that?"

"I think I can control myself."

He did, but he didn't like it. No matter how many times he dislocated this shoulder, it was always a bitch going back in. Canby was practiced and efficient, though, which supported his claim that he'd at one point been a legitimate physician. While he probed the joint checking for tears, Dean rasped, "Got a drink?"

There was that smile again, like Dean was cute bordering on quaint. "Yeah, sure," said Canby. "Come on into the kitchen."

Canby had none of Rufus's standards for alcohol. He didn't have the unusually well stocked spice rack of most witches, either, and Dean wasn't sure at this point whether that was a pro or a con. Canby poured Dean some whiskey that smelled like rubbing alcohol in a jelly glass—Dean had been hoping for moonshine, which at least usually tasted pretty good, but apparently Canby only took his Farmer Brown routine so far—and busied himself with a clanking enamel kettled topped with, for whatever reason, a tea cozy shaped like the guidance counselor from South Park.

"Thanks." The drink numbed Dean's gums, and the pain in his shoulder was receding to a dull throb.

"Sure. You want to tell me what you're really after, now that's out of the way?"

Dean swallowed his mouthful of whiskey. Battery acid, he decided, with top notes of paint thinner and cirrhosis. "I know I didn't give you much, Canby, but jeez, even cheap whorehouses let you catch your breath after."

Canby's face hardened. "I asked you not to swear in my house."

Dean had to replay the sentence in his mind. "What, whor—?"

"The other," Canby snapped. "Now talk."

Dean looked at him carefully. "What do you want me to say? 'You're the best I ever had'? I can lie, if that's what you're into."

"Come on, son. You wrenched your shoulder a day ago, by the bruising. It's a dislocation, not a gunshot, so even if you've been upsetting people, a hospital wouldn't think enough of an injury like that to report you to the authorities, and hospitals are a lot easier to find than I am." Canby leant against the stove holding the tea cozy. "That means you wanted to see me specially, and you thought you were being smooth driving around with a dislocated shoulder to disguise the fact, which means you ain't very bright. Do better."

"Or what?" Dean asked. "Mr. Mackey's gonna shoot me?"

"He might."

Dean's eyes flicked between Canby's hand and his face. "You'll ruin your kettle cover."

"Don't think I won't be sad about it."

Dean watched him a moment longer. It was long enough to be sure he wasn't going to get shot. If physical violence had been Canby's stock in trade, he wouldn't have bothered with threats. "I want to find someone."

"How come?"

"They took something from me," Dean said, and that much wasn't a lie.

"So go to the police."

"Already went. Well, more like they came to me."

Canby laughed, and the gun made a muffled _clunk_ through Mr. Mackey when he set it on the counter. "Yeah, that I believe."

"Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Well, was Rufus just jerking my chain when he said that you could help?"

"Depends. What is it, exactly, that he told you?" Dean held his eye but didn't say anything. "Ah. I wondered if that part was a lie. Rufus _hates_ giving up a contact."

"I want to find somebody," Dean said again. "I want to know where he is within a hundred-yard radius. Can you do it?"

Canby sucked on his teeth. "Interesting. Maybe."

"Are you a witch?"

"Nope."

"Then what the— What are you?"

"I'm a problem-solver."

"Yeah, but are you solving problems with bowls of baby's blood, is what I'm getting at."

"Not generally. Though I've never understood why folks get all upset about that; you can take a few milliliters of the red stuff as safely from a baby as from anybody else." Dean couldn't help staring; Canby looked at him like he was slow. "It's a question of quantity. These things often are."

Dean blinked. "Right. Okay. So you're squeaky-clean, no devil-worship at all."

Canby nodded slowly. "That about covers it. Yeah, that's pretty much the crux of it."

Dean was starting to lose patience. "I came clean with you. If you want to do any kind of business, return the favor and tell me what your angle is."

Canby drew another cigarette out of a shirt pocket. "Professionally speaking, I guess I'm a priest."

"What kind of priest?"

"Every kind of priest."

* * *

"You're a hunter," Canby said as he led Dean along a track worn into the pasture. The sun was going down, and Canby had a pail of corn. "You obviously could find witches if you wanted them. Why didn't you?"

"Because witches are skanks?"

"And?"

A flash of screaming, of blood and bone and juxtapositions of the two never intended, cut through Dean's mind. He pushed it down. "Because of the literal devil-worship?"

"Right." Canby stopped in front of a chicken coop. "So you have a problem, but you don't want to use witchcraft, or be a party to witchcraft, because you're a hunter and you know that selling your soul ain't just a Sunday school story. All of us have wants, but not much is worth eternal torment." He glanced at Dean as he opened the door to the coop. "Is it?"

Dean's smile was strained. "Not much, no."

Canby began to strew the corn in front of a collection of some of the most bizarre birds Dean had ever seen. There were hens and roosters in the familiar shapes and colors, too, but the others looked like avian drag queens. "What the hell are those?"

"Chickens. Plain chickens for plain tables, fancy chickens for fancy tables. And watch your step, because some of these breeds I spent years hunting up, and some of them I had to breed myself. A lot of times, you can get by with substituting modern equivalents, sometimes those actually work even better, but other times it's important to have historical accuracy."

Fancy chickens. He'd driven five hours with a busted shoulder for fancy chickens. "I don't get it," he said finally. "You said you aren't a witch."

"I'm not. Devils aren't the only thing that like a small, furry snack. Or a large one, as the case may be. As far as I can tell, demons don't really care about sacrifices except as a matter of tradition and a handy way to start corrupting people with the small-time acts of cruelty and waste, but I haven't gone around asking any to be sure. I was raised Southern Baptist, with a healthy fear of the devil's works."

Dean stopped and looked at him. "You're summoning something else."

Canby shook his head. "Spirits are summoned. Gods are petitioned."

Dean recoiled. "You're calling up _pagan gods_? Do you have any idea what those sons— Do you know what those things do?"

"If you ask nicely, they may do what you ask them to. And, this being the important part, they don't put a lien on your soul. Most gods reckon it's a perk if they don't have to show up for your afterlife at all."

"No, they just want to show up for your blood sacrifices in this one. I've met gods, Canby. They're monsters. If you don't understand that, then you're just one screw-up away from finding out. Whatever favors you're getting along the way—they're not worth it."

Canby led him out of the coop and carefully latched the door. "Some gods are more bloodthirsty than others. Most will take what they can get, even if it's not what they'd prefer. Every client has a limit. Things they're willing to do or have done for them, things they aren't. My job's to work within those limits, and that's what makes me different from a witch. My way's less certain, but it's less certain both ways: in the result, and in the cost. Ah, don't go in there, that there's the snake hutch."

Dean stepped away from what he'd thought was another chicken coop. "If it's so safe and moral, what you do, why are they paying you? Why doesn't everybody just dial up Zeus on the 900 line?"

"Because Zeus hasn't picked up since 1752, for one thing." Canby was headed now for the barn. "There's half your answer right there: know-how. You got to know which gods to try, and how to try them. Do you know how to supplicate—that means 'ask nicely,' by the way; I know you're not real familiar with the practice—Boldogasszony? Atargatis? Which of them's likely to do what, for what? Of course you don't. I do, and that's worth something. But say you got lucky and found out. What would you do then? Burn a placenta on birch twigs? Castrate yourself with a knife consecrated in Balikli Göl?"

"Uh," said Dean.

"Well, let's say that you do—"

"Can we not?"

"—What would you do _then_? Walk away once you had what you wanted?"

"Well, yeah, pretty much." Dean followed Canby into the barn and watched as he fetched down a sack of feed. "Isn't that the general idea? Quid pro quo, everybody goes home happy. According to you."

Canby handled the feed sack like it weighed nothing. "The tricky part about receiving favors from a god," he said, without turning, "isn't initiating the relationship. It's terminating it. That's where I come in. I manage the relationship."

Canby's speech had left Dean with a lot of questions, not all of which was he sure he wanted answered. "So these gods don't like getting dumped for putting out on the first date, but they don't mind you slutting around with other gods? I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time believing that."

Canby shrugged, finished with the feed, and turned toward the house. "Gods aren't jealous, by and large. What they like is loyalty, which isn't the same thing as monogamy. And loyalty takes tending." The grounds were in twilight; a cow mooed somewhere, and the air was ripe with manure. "I am a gardener, sir. I am a constant gardener."

_Practical application (husbandry)._

The walk back to the house was silent. Dean's first instinct was to dismiss Canby's claims. Scratch that; his first instinct was to get the hell out of Dodge, because gods might not be demons, but they weren't a hell of a lot better. Demons at least all died the same. But of course, Canby was selling _concierge_ god-services. No need to trouble yourself with dealing with gods directly.

Dean thought of the hundreds of rituals he and Sam and Dad had performed over the years. A lot of their incantations had invocations buried in them that Dean had never paid much attention to; if it wasn't "Hail, Satan!" it wasn't on their radar. Yet those rituals had worked. They still seemed to him different from what Canby was describing, but he'd never put that much thought into the mechanics. Clearly, Canby had a high enough success rate to support a small farm's worth of sacrificial animals. It wasn't surefire, by the man's own admission, but then, Dean's backup plan wasn't something that he'd ever tried for himself, either. And time was of of the essence.

So much had passed already.

Back in the house, his host switched on the living room light and resumed his seat in the rocking chair. Dean still didn't take the couch. His shoulder had dulled to an ache, and he was still tired, and Sam was still gone. His head hurt. "So you're, what." He searched for an appropriate term. "Like a god-broker?"

Canby looked delighted. "A god-broker! I like that. That's pretty good. Not everything I do is priesting, though. Maybe thirty, forty percent. Sometimes you can borrow old forms and bend them your own way. Sometimes, if you have the right stuff to work with, that can actually be stronger. It all depends."

This stank. Everything about it stank, from Canby's goddamned chain-smoking to the pig shit outside. "Say I hire you. What god are you going to ring up for this, and what are they going to want?"

"Trade secrets," said Canby.

"Are you kidding me?"

For the first time, Canby betrayed annoyance. "Did I barge into your home and start insulting your livelihood? You came to me. If you don't like the way I do business, you can show yourself out anytime."

Dean pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. The tightness in his chest, the tightness that had been there for two days and wasn't getting better, that was panic. Panic made you sloppy, and panic made you stupid. But he couldn't switch it off. He never could, with Sam. "Prove you can do it."

Canby regarded him with undisguised disdain. "You need someone to have manners for you. It's a good thing that's a service I offer professionally. No, son, this is not where you make demands and I do your bidding. This is where you say what you've got to offer so I can say if I'm interested."

"If there's one thing this life taught me early, it's that if it seems too good to be true, it is."

"Lucky I don't claim to be that good, then. Look, when you've got a problem like yours, you've got three kinds of messy to choose from: mine, theirs, and yours."

Dean narrowed his eyes. "Mine?"

"Do nothing."

It was designed to rile Dean, and it worked. "A dragon hoard," he ground out. "The real thing."

"Yeah?" Canby whistled. "Boy. What's in it?"

"Gold, what else?" Put that way, it did sound considerably less exotic.

There was that pitying look again. "Is that really the kind of coin you bring to a transaction like this?"

"You just gouged me a couple of hundred for my shoulder!"

"That was for your shoulder."

Dean ran a mental inventory on the contents of the trunk. "Mojo bag. Nineteenth century. Works like a supernatural amp."

Canby made an approving sound. "Nice. What else?"

Dean gritted his teeth. "Dagger. Magical. Damascus steel by way of the Vikings, serious old-time religion." When Canby just nodded, Dean banked his rage and went ahead. He'd be showing his desperation, but for some people—people like Canby—desperation was part of the bargain. They wanted everything you had more than they wanted something valuable.

Besides, they had, like, half a dozen of the things at this point.

"The sword of an angel."

Canby raised a skeptical eyebrow. "What's that when it's at home?"

Dean smiled thinly and took some pleasure in being about to rearrange this guy's entire conception of the cosmic order. "Exactly what it says."

"Huh. What's it do?"

It was the logical, practical question. It was precisely the question Dean would have asked in Canby's place, but it still irritated him. It irritated him to be standing here haggling for his brother's life. It irritated him that it had become habit. "What do you think it does? It's an angel blade. It kills things. It kills everything. Demons, every kind of monster ever spawned"—And hopefully the ones that had yet to be, but no need to go into that just yet.—" _angels._ "

"Why should I believe that this pig-sticker is what you say?"

"Because." Dean set his jaw. "I'm Dean Winchester."

Canby just sat there patiently, waiting for more.

There really was no graceful way to salvage that. "I take it you haven't heard of me."

"Should I have?"

Dean narrowed his eyes. "You work for hunters, don't you?"

"What do I look like, a door-to-door salesman? Hunters are some of my best customers, but they come to me. I keep myself to myself; no time to tend to the animals or my researches, otherwise. So, no, son, I haven't heard of you. You can spare me whatever it is you're known for; I don't keep up on all the little vagaries."

"The apocalypse is a little vagary?"

"Must've been, if I ain't ever heard about it."

There was a point there. "Look, I don't have time for this. Just name your price."

Canby looked at him and rocked for a while. Looked, rocked, looked. "You a good hunter?"

Dean smiled tightly. "You could say that."

"Alright, then. The mojo bag, the Viking dagger, and the heart of a werewolf."

Dean's stomach dropped. "The full moon was two days ago."

"It sure was."

"Fine. You get the bag and the dagger now, you do your thing, I'll come back with the heart."

"I'm afraid it's my policy to require payment upfront for new clients."

Dean felt himself blanch with anger. "No deal."

Canby shrugged. "Okay."

And he seemed content to leave it at that. "The bag, the dagger, the gold, and the angel blade," Dean said, trying to keep his voice level and unconcerned. "All of them are yours. Any of them's rarer than werewolf guts. That's my final offer."

"The bag and the dagger could be useful in my line of work. I got enough money already. Weapons are useless to me. You want my services, come back with the heart."

For a while, all Dean could do was stare. Then he turned and left.

"Call first," Canby called after him.

He made it to the end of Canby's drive before he threw the car into park and pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, controlling his breathing by force of will. It was fine. They were fine. There were demon signs less than a hundred miles down the road. Time for plan B.

Sam might not have time for plan B.

Sam might not have had time for his little road trip as it was. Suddenly it rolled up in Dean in a gut-churning wave: how _wrong_ it was for him to be here. Sam was in New England. Dean was in Appalachia. He was hundreds of miles and days, _days_ away from Sam. _Dean was here,_ and Sam wasn't. And that was all he knew for sure. Sam could be hurt. Sam could be bleeding. Sam could be worse than bleeding; Sam could be catatonic, the wall in his mind gone for good, falling forever. Sam could be in the hands of demons or hunters or some hopped-up monster champing at the bit for Mother's Day. Sam could be trapped. Sam could already be—

* * *

—Deep in conversation with the drain pipe. It was a good listener.

"It's just," said Sam, "everything's different, but everything's the same, but everything being the same is what's so different."

"I know exactly what you mean," said the drain pipe.

"I knew you would."

The drain pipe swelled and deflated, swelled and deflated. Its voice was raspy. "You shouldn't get too hung up on that. Your insides will fall out. Like an omelette."

"Yeah, I know, but last thing I remember, he'd hardly even touch me." The walls rippled with the vibrations of his voice. "Then I wake up and he's like he was when we were good. Almost like that. I mean, hell, I wake up and I'm wearing a different shirt size. Is the floor bothering you, too?"

"No," said the alcove.

Its voice was the size of a grain silo. Sam shrank from it and fell on his ass.

He crawled back over to the drain pipe and sat sideways next to it, pressed against the wall so the alcove wouldn't see him. The pipe's concrete stopper fuzzed over in sympathy. "I used to have this dream," Sam said, hushed. "It's, like, an hour before a seminar class, and I haven't done the reading. So I'm going to try to skim and fake it. Only I don't know what the reading _is._ I can't look it up, because I can't find the syllabus. I can't find the syllabus, because I never picked it up, because I never went to the first class, because I never registered for it, because I never enrolled in anything after I got off the bus, and the whole year's over and I haven't been to anything I was supposed to. The dream, I didn't even have it while I was _at Stanford._ I started having it afterward. And I kept having it. The _apocalypse_ started, and I was still having this dream. I went to Hell, came back, apparently, and I'm still having this dream. Seems kind of unfair."

"Don't you think you're being kind of a pussy, though?" the pipe said, sticking its tongue out, tasting the air.

"No, I like dogs better."

"Yeah, but, in misogynistic, _semper fi_ terms. You're just sitting here."

"I'm trapped."

"That's no excuse."

"Um."

"Look," said a new voice, and turning took a very long time, but Sam did it. There was a great totem pole climbing up the wall. Blue and red and ocher dark-shine. One of its heads turned, owl-like. "If you spend long enough in a cage, you sprout feathers," it said.

Sam nodded. He remembered that from the back of the seed packet when they grew marigolds in elementary school.

"So do you want to sit around," said the drain pipe, "or do you want to get out of here and make a lot of pancakes?"

"A _lot_ of pancakes," said the alcove.

Sam thought about the pros and cons. "Pancakes, please."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Dean finds himself a demon. Sam finds himself an outlet. Fun for the whole family.


End file.
